miss havisham analysis essay

• Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

• Literature Notes
• Miss Havisham
• Great Expectations at a Glance
• Book Summary
• About Great Expectations
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Chapters 1-3
• Chapters 4-6
• Chapters 7-9
• Chapters 10-12
• Chapters 13-15
• Chapters 16-17
• Chapters 18-19
• Chapters 20-22
• Chapters 23-25
• Chapters 26-28
• Chapters 29-31
• Chapters 32-34
• Chapters 35-37
• Chapters 38-39
• Chapters 40-42
• Chapters 43-45
• Chapters 46-48
• Chapters 49-51
• Chapters 52-54
• Chapters 55-57
• Chapters 58-59
• Character Analysis
• Joe Gargery
• Jaggers and Wemmick
• Character Map
• Charles Dickens Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Use of the Serial Form
• Children and 19th-Century England
• Famous Quotes
• Film Versions
• Full Glossary
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Character Analysis Miss Havisham

She is one of the most strange and grotesque characters in the story, the "wicked witch" of the fairy tale. In adopting Estella , she seeks to protect the girl from the hurts she herself has suffered. That intention, however, degrades into her training Estella to love no one and exact revenge from all men. Miss Havisham was proud, beautiful, passionate, and headstrong, things Compeyson used against her. Deeply hurt, reeling from the loss of control she felt by the betrayal, and determined to regain both control and self-image, Miss Havisham chooses her lifestyle. She wields her money as her weapon of power and trains her daughter to succeed where she has failed. But it backfires. Estella ends up not only unable to love men, but unable to love Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham's creation is her downfall, and Pip is her mirror. When she sees the depth of Pip's feelings for Estella, Miss Havisham sees herself with Compeyson and remembers what she once was. Her redemption is in seeing her sins and showing her remorse. She does the only thing she can do — takes responsibility for her actions. She asks Pip's forgiveness, helps Herbert Pocket, and leaves a fortune to Herbert's father.

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Empathy and Redemption for Miss Havisham: A Character Analysis

Natalie Layne Baker

Natalie Layne Baker's writing has appeared at Audible, Hachette, Book Riot, Submittable, Entropy, Memoir Mixtapes, Howl Round, and Bone & Ink Lit Zine. She currently resides in Philadelphia.

View All posts by Natalie Layne Baker

Charles Dickens wrote , in his novel David Copperfield , “I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.” This line is spoken by Agnes Wickfield, with the novel’s main antagonist being the evil and misfortune against which she wills her love for her ailing father. Agnes, being David’s close friend and eventual wife, is one of the novel’s most important characters, and the longing for love and truth to prevail over all is a central theme of the novel. By the end of the novel, such love and truth has prevailed in at least one sense: David and Agnes marry and have five children, seeming to have a lovely future ahead of them despite any of the other hardships they faced or will continue to face.

Agnes Wickfield is a pretty classic type of Dickens character: the strong-willed, loyal woman who symbolizes morality and the male protagonist’s longing. Her company includes women like Oliver Twist ‘s Nancy, whose noble sacrifice saves Oliver from an unsavory life, and Estella Havisham, the cool and indifferent object of protagonist Pip’s affections, who nevertheless is implied in at least one ending to partner with Pip.

Although, or perhaps because these fictional women are a typical “type” for Dickens, there is one who is more or less a perfect antithesis to them, and who is arguably one of the author’s most famous characters: Miss Havisham of Great Expectations .

Who is Miss Havisham?

Miss Amelia Havisham, the famously scorned lover who has not taken off her wedding dress since the day she was “jilted” at the altar many years ago, is about as antithetical to the virtues of love and truth embodied by Agnes Wickfield as one can get. She is vengeful toward men, instructing Estella, whom she adopts, to consider men merely as tools she can use for her own gain. Although not a constant presence in Great Expectations , Miss Havisham casts a long shadow over the whole novel, not understanding the error of her ways until shortly before her tragic (and violent) death near the novel’s end.

Miss Havisham is among the more complex characters to appear in a Dickens novel, in part due to her portrayal within the work itself, but equally due to our cultural reception and interpretation of her since Great Expectations began its serialized publication in 1860. Myriad portrayals of the character throughout media have left a broader cultural impression that may not be as accurate to the source material as one would think, inviting equally myriad questions of how and why our culture would morph this particular character into something different.

This Miss Havisham character analysis will endeavor to shine a different light on the spiteful lover, one which invites you to consider her with a new sense of empathy.

What is Miss Havisham’s Age?

The first and maybe most important misconception to address about Miss Havisham is she’s younger than you probably think she is. Like, a lot younger.

As LitHub pointed out in their aptly (hilariously, depressingly) titled post “I regret to inform you that Miss Havisham, Dickens’ embittered crone, is actually only…40” Miss Havisham is not the ancient, decrepit old witch that you may have once thought she was.

Kristen Hanley Cardozo, a Victorian literature PhD candidate, pointed this fact out in a viral tweet last year. In a thread, Hanley Cardozo addresses that 40 years was not particularly old in Dickens’s time (the author was, in fact, nearly 50 himself when Great Expectations began publishing), as well as the fact that often Victorian novels depict men in their 30s and 40s as being “in the prime of life.”

It’s worth noting that Miss Havisham being so young is of exceptional note, at least according to Dickens’s own notes on the character. Hanley Cardozo shares that the author’s notes for the character say she is “scarcely forty,” and I think the word “scarcely” is important here. “Scarcely” is one of Dickens’s favorite adverbs, it would seem, appearing frequently throughout the text of Great Expectations , in such contexts as an observation that “scarcely sounded flattering” or that Pip could “scarcely stammer [he] had no objection” while feeling a rush of nervousness. The word is used frequently in Great Expectations at its most literal meaning, so it is reasonable to assume the scarcity of Miss Havisham’s being 40 contrasts with the abundance of scorn she carries with her, an amount one might expect of someone twice her age.

Of course, it’s equally worth noting that Miss Havisham’s age is never explicitly addressed within the text of Great Expectations , so we cannot reasonably state any sort of canonical intention on Dickens’s behalf. If we consider the texts of his other novels, many of the notable women (Abigail, Estella, Nancy) are young, often either the protagonist’s love interest or an unflappable supporter of his ambitions. And while the metatext of the author’s notes implies Dickens’s awareness of 40 being a young age to be so broken a human, the metatext of his personal life includes details such as his leaving Catherine Dickens (aged 43) for Ellen Ternan, a 19-year-old. (H.T. again to Hanley Cardozo for this information . Seriously, just go read the entire thread.)

In short, Dickens’s own intentions behind aging Miss Havisham a scarce 40 are unclear and unknowable, but it is not beyond the bounds of reason to assume the all-encompassing muchness of Miss Havisham’s scorned loverdom was exceptional for someone her age, at least during the character’s genesis in the author’s notes.

So, what happened? Why have subsequent interpretations of the Miss Havisham character leaned so heavily into her supposed old age? LitHub cites six performers who have portrayed Miss Havisham in notable film or television adaptations; why is the average age of these women 48 — nearly a decade older than the scarce 40 of Dickens’s notes — and why are these middle-aged actors dressed up in white hair and wrinkles as though they are twice their age?

Women Over 40 Are Old

At least, that’s what our society implies. And this is not an indictment of the 1860s, a less-awoken time in our near past; it’s as much an indictment of right now, how culturally, we discard women over the age of 40, unvaryingly, across different media.

Women in Hollywood are significantly less likely to score leading roles than their male counterparts at any age, but it is strikingly so once the women in question are over the age of 40. In one report , it was found that after the age of 40, women appear in approximately 20% of onscreen leading roles for people their age, while their male counterparts snag the lion’s share of such roles. Coupled with the fact that onscreen romances skew wildly toward middle-aged men being partnered with much younger women , the portrait of age equality for women in Hollywood is about as bright as the interior of Miss Havisham’s decaying mansion.

The landscape is not much better in literature . While it’s reasonably easy to find lists like this, which celebrate the achievements of women over 40 in literature, one has to be cognizant that the need for such a list exists in the first place due to this same intersection of age and sexism. In fact, this list’s author addresses that need in the preamble, sharing her own experiences querying agents as a first-time author who was also a woman of color in her 40s.

Literature is a reflection of our society, either in challenging or upholding it. While it’s impossible to know for certain what Dickens’s intentions were for Miss Havisham, the work itself (with the significant aid of its adaptations) seems to uphold the idea that women over the age of 40 are old. Although it’s clear that Miss Havisham’s older appearance is due in no small part to the trauma she’s experienced, and her subsequent inability to live beyond the trauma, the only other middle-aged woman in Great Expectations is Mrs. Joe, another antagonist whose abusive and manipulative nature stems from immense personal loss. There is no “typical” middle-aged woman against whom to measure the extremity of Miss Havisham’s (and to a lesser extent, Mrs. Joe’s) character, therefore, although the author’s intentions remain mostly unprovable, the actual impact of his novel is unambiguous.

Scarcely 40, Abundantly Scarred

To combat this, I propose a Miss Havisham character analysis that hinges upon empathy. In fairness, I don’t think this is something completely outside the text of Great Expectations . Miss Havisham does in fact achieve some sort of redemption within the text of the novel itself: near novel’s end she reconciles with Pip and acknowledges that the coldness she bred in Estella’s heart was borne of her own selfishness. Such redemption is unfortunately tarnished by her violent end, burning to death in her mansion when her decrypted old wedding dress catches fire, but Dickens’s own portrayal of Miss Havisham is not without empathy.

Beyond empathizing with her unknowing-deathbed realization of the error of her ways, though, we should go further and empathize with the tragedy of her life itself. As a young woman, she was passionate and opinionated, traits that her companion, Compeyson, disliked, seemingly because they did not befit the docility he desired in a wife.

Miss Havisham is not only a jilted lover. (Incidentally, “jilted” is the word of choice to describe Compeyson’s betrayal in just about every piece I read to research this essay, despite the word not appearing once in the text of Great Expectations , though that’s a mystery for another time.) She is also a victim of her society, one which did not value her boisterousness and strongheadedness, as actualized in Compeyson’s abandoning her on their wedding day. While this interpretation does not change the fact that Miss Havisham grooms and manipulates Estella to eschew all emotion (a genuinely terrible thing to do to a child), it does offer a new complexity to her motivations. She teaches Stella to never show emotion, because the loudness of her own emotional life was the exact thing for which Compeyson, and the society at large, punished her.

Everyone has known that one guy who refers to all his ex-girlfriends as “crazy.” It’s a simple sentence (“My ex-girlfriend is crazy.”) that betrays an entire history of disregard for women’s interior lives. The complexities of both parties’ inner selves are stripped away, their individual and genuine hurts over the dissolution of their relationship disappear, and all that remains of the complex tapestry of their human connection are shreds of fabric trotted out as invitations for quick sympathy. There is no more detail given, though the story is more whole and deep. It is a disservice to all parties.

Though she is scarcely 40, Miss Havisham has endured great pain that has seemed to age her faster than is reasonable. If we choose not to take her as static, a cruel and embittered woman whose only stray beam of humanity shines through shortly before her death, and instead consider the whole of her history as explicit motivation, that the pain of being discounted by her lover and her whole society is so intense that it has visibly aged her beyond her scarce years, we not only get a more interesting literary character in return. In considering the full weight of this female character, with all her passion and trauma and cruelties, we commit a small act toward undoing that broader cultural disservice. We endeavor toward the prevailing of real love and truth.

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Character Analysis of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations

• Categories: Havisham

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Words: 436 |

Published: Apr 11, 2019

Words: 436 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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by Carol Ann Duffy

Havisham summary and analysis of "havisham".

This poem is written from the perspective of the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations . It appears in Carol Ann Duffy 's collection The World's Wife, published in 1999. In Dickens' novel, Miss Havisham is a spinster who was swindled and left at the altar by a man she had fallen in love with. She then becomes reclusive and obsessive, never removing her wedding dress and stopping the clock at the time she learned she had been left. She uses her adopted daughter to try to enact revenge on men, choosing Pip, the novel's narrator, as her victim.

The speaker begins the first stanza by referring to the man who stood her up at the altar, calling him, "Darling sweetheart bastard." Her love and her resentment are both clearly still raging, and the two feelings mingle. Wishing for his death has turned her eyes to "dark green pebbles," and she sees ropes growing on the back of her hands. She says, "Not a day since then/I haven’t wished him dead. Prayed for it/so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,/ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with." These incomplete sentences sound like the mutterings of a person out of her right mind.

The next stanza mirrors the first by starting with a fragmented description, but this time Miss Havisham describes herself, and she needs only one word: "Spinster." She then reflects upon the time she has spent since the wedding. She seems to have barely left this room. She spends "whole days" in bed, and she likens herself to a crow or another bird, "cawing" to nobody while the dress turns yellow with age. She says, "the dress/yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe..." The way Duffy phrases this line makes it unclear whether the thing trembling is the narrator or the dress. Either way, the trembling stops her from changing into something else from her wardrobe. Miss Havisham's identity has become interwoven with her dress, and her identity as someone left at the altar has become interwoven with her identity. The "slewed mirror" that follows underscores her unsteady sense of self, as does the moment where the speaker refers to herself in the third person, then in the first person: "...her, myself, who did this/to me?"

In the next stanza the speaker describes herself casting "Puce curses that are sounds not words." This echoes the earlier line where the speaker caws; the force of her pain strips her of her humanity, leaving her to make animalistic noises. She describes her dreams at night; her idea of a "better" night is one with a "lost body" hovering over her with her tongue "in its mouth in its ear/then down till I suddenly bite awake." The sexual connotations here are clear, but the phrase "the lost body" and the way the speaker refers to the body as an "it" and never a "he" or a "you" add a dark twist to the moment; this moment foreshadows the male corpse that appears in the final stanza.

"Love's/hate behind a white veil," the speaker continues for the final stanza. The enjambment Duffy uses to cut "Love's/hate" juxtaposes the two to each other physically, and the speaker leaves ambiguity about whether "love's" is possessive (the hate that love has) or a contraction (love IS hate). Either way, hate, according to the logic of this poem, is an intrinsic part of love. Most images of love in this poem are overlaid with images of hatred or violence. The next line includes one of these moments, where the speaker "stabbed at the wedding cake." Then appears the male corpse, which the speaker demands for the purpose of a "long slow honeymoon." As mentioned before, this calls back to the lost body from the narrator's dreams and furthers the necromantic feeling of the poem.

The speaker ends the poem on the line, "Don't think it's only the heart that b-b-b-breaks." Like other moments in the poem, this can be read two ways: as an imperative, or as a fragmented sentence missing a subject. By breaking up the word "breaks," the speaker emphasizes her own brokenness; the moment also reads like a stutter, which compounds Miss Havisham's difficulty communicating through words throughout this poem.

This poem is split into four stanzas with four lines each. The poem has no set rhyme scheme, and the meter is purposefully irregular, giving the impression that the speaker is speaking jerkily. She lacks control of herself, of her words. This poem is a dramatic monologue, a form Duffy specialized in; the collection this poem appeared in, The World's Wife, is comprised of poems written from the perspectives of women from popular myths and tales, women who were previously stuck in the background of these narratives.

The first stanza shows how the speaker is stuck in her hatred and love for her ex-fiancé. "Not a day since then/I haven't wished him dead," she says. Yet she still wears her wedding dress, and is clearly mired in her failed relationship. Yet she prayed for his death so much that it hardened her eyes and made them dark green. This image indicates that she is fossilizing. She then describes "ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with." The ropes are part of her body, just as her hatred for this man is part of her.

She then refers to herself, practically spitting the word "Spinster." Then she says, "I stink and remember." Decaying and remembering appear to be the speaker's only actions now; she describes her life spent in bed, cawing "Nooooo" at the wall. Women, especially older women, are often unfavorably compared to shrieking birds. The speaker has become this stereotype.

The confusion over whether the dress or Miss Havisham is trembling when she opens the wardrobe blurs the line between the character's identity and the wedding dress and, with it, her past. Both she and the dress are haunted by the ghost of her past betrayal. When she looks in the mirror, she barely recognizes herself, seeing it "slewed" and referring to herself in the third person. With the line "her, myself, who did this/to me?" the enjambment makes the reader see "myself, who did this" broken away from the rest of the question, complicating the moment by putting the blame on herself before asking who might have done this to her. Paradoxically, she appears to be moving blame away from the man who broke her heart, perhaps because her exigent love for him does not allow her to entirely accept how he has hurt her.

As mentioned in the Summary section, the "Puce curses that are sounds not words" make the speaker less human. She is more like an animal or a witch, degraded by her humiliation. The word puce is often used to describe the reddish-purple color one's face turns when angry or aggravated, underscoring the height of the speaker's emotion while also bringing the color of blood to mind. The attention on the body in this poem highlights how the speaker's body is decaying with her mind and her sense of self.

Though night with a "lost body" hanging over oneself sounds like a nightmare, to this speaker this is a good dream. She is sexually drawn to that lost body, who can only be her ex-fiancé. She has her "fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear/then down." This line is clearly sexual, and in a way it objectifies the body; it does not move, and she does not refer to it using personal pronouns. This turns the moment sinister, for the body in her imagination does not yearn back for her. She takes revenge upon him by violating his body. However, "biting" awake seems more like waking up suddenly from a nightmare than it does from a good dream, so she does not seem to fully enjoy her revenge.

We then arrive at the curiously enjambed line "Love's/hate behind a white veil." As mentioned in the Summary section, "Love's" can be read as a contraction of "Love is," meaning that love is simply hate hidden behind a white veil (as, for example, a bride's face) or could be referring to the hate that love possesses. Either way, something waits behind that veil, with the implication that the gesture of unveiling will reveal something—perhaps that the true nature of love is not too different from that of hate.

The next line uses onomatopoeia in a way that links the image of the red balloon bursting and her stabbing at the wedding cake. The "Bang" could be the sound of the red balloon bursting or the sound of her stabbing, and the sound of "Bang" is echoed in "stab" and the first syllable of "balloon." The red balloon seems to symbolize the way the speaker's hopes were burst by her fiancé's actions, but its color likens it to an organ, to her broken heart.

The speaker goes on to stab "at a wedding cake." This action perverts the tradition of cutting cake at a wedding and turns that motion into something violent while preserving the action. This encapsulates the speaker's mixed feelings toward the man she almost married. The stabbing leads directly into the next line, "Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon." By saying this, the speaker asks both for his death and for his company. The "long slow honeymoon" she asks for hints at the long process of decay that a corpse is subject to. Is this the speaker's new idea of love, to decay with someone? Even her idea of what a relationship should look like has become warped.

The final two lines are spoken imperatively, but the addressee is unclear. The speaker seems to address the reader and the reader's voyeurism. It is the reader, not her ex-fiancé, whom she vaguely threatens. She stammers over the word "breaks" in the final line, which indicates difficulty with language and nods again toward the fragmentation of her identity. However, the stammer sounds deliberate. She could be mocking her own sobs, or she could be imagining the way her ex-fiancé would babble if she were able to hurt him in the way she wants to. The tone of this final line is darkly playful, spiteful but not without a touch of humor. The speaker gestures toward something that breaks other than a heart but does not name it; this leaves the reader searching for an answer, but dreading finding one.

Havisham Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Havisham is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Havisham

Havisham study guide contains a biography of Carol Ann Duffy, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Great Expectations: Miss Havisham Character Analysis

• Category Literature
• Subcategory English Literature
• Topic Havisham

Great Expectation by Charles Dickens tells the story of Pip, an orphan that lives with his aggressive sister, Mrs. Joe and her sweet husband, Joe in the marshes. One day, the main character decides to visit his parents grave and there he meets a convict, Magwitch, who Pip helps escape. He later gets sent to visit Miss Havisham at Satis House. Miss Havisham is a disaster. She was left at the altar on her wedding day and has been emotionally unstable since. During his visit to Satis House, Pip meets Estella whom he deeply falls in love and hopes he will someday become a gentleman to be worthy of her. One day an anonymous benefactor makes it possible for Pip to go to London. There he will have the chance to become a true gentleman and get the education he never had. In London, the main character makes new friends and learns about a whole new different life. On his 21st birthday, Pip receives all of his fortunes and meets his benefactor. Surprisingly, it was Magwitch, the convict he helped to escape in the marshes when he was a kid. Magwitch had just escaped from prison and needs Pip help. They devise a plan were Magwitch will flee London on a steamboat but they fail to do so. In the end, the main character realizes what life is truly about and what is really worth to him. The theme of revenge is present in this book. It can be seen through Miss Havisham and her revenge on her fiance who left her at the altar and all men. She adopts Estella and raises her up to be an ignorant and cold woman. Revenge can also be seen through Orlick, Joe’s apprentice, who was always very jealous of Pip. He ends up sabotaging Magwatch final escape and killing Mrs. Joe. Lastly, revenge can be seen through Magwitch, who wanted Compeyson to go to jail.To begin with, in the book Miss Havisham is a character who is motivated by revenge. Since being left at the altar by Compeyson, her fiance, she has sought revenge on men. As a result, Miss Havisham’s adopted Estella and raises her to be cold-hearted and ignorant woman that breaks men’s hearts. In Great Expectation, Miss Havisham calls Pip to visit Satis House. When he arrives he is very surprised and confused as Miss Havisham is still wearing her wedding dress and the house looks like there is going to be a massive wedding. There, Pip meets Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter. He falls deeply in love with her no matter how she treats him. Estella is very cruel, cold and uninterested in Pip, she evens offends him. In the next quote, Miss Havisham and Estella are having a conversation about Pip. “ “With this boy? Why, he is a common labouring-boy!” I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer-only it seemed so unlikely-“Well? You can break his heart.” ” (690) This quote shows Miss Havisham’s revengeful motives, how she will use Estella to fulfill her duties. She views the human heart like a toy, which you can play with and tear it apart. This shows Miss Havisham’s opinion in men, how women can also play with their feeling just like her fiance played with hers, you can easily “break” a heart like you would with a toy. Since being left at the altar, Miss Havisham has badly wanted revenge on men. Due to her mental instability and deep depression, she is not able to fulfill the duties herself, and she adopted Estella do them instead. The real reason why Pip is at Satis House, is to serve as practice for Estella. She has to learn how to act around men, making them fall in love with her to then break their heart. Miss Havisham adopting Estella and later inviting Pip to meet her, just for her to practice how to break a heart with him is a way she does revenge on men on this book. She wants to make men suffer through Estella and Pip is the first victim.

Secondly, another character in the book who seeks revenge is Orlick. Orlick is Joe’s assistant in the forge that always held a grudge against Pip and Mrs.Joe . He saw Pip as a threat, he thought he would take his job at the forge. Mrs. Joe was always very rude to him and impulsive. Later in the book, Orlick writes an anonymous letter to Pip, saying to meet him in the marshes. There he ties Pip up and accuses him of stealing “his girl” Biddy and preventing him from working at Miss Havisham’s. He also confesses, he was the one that badly injured Mrs. Joe, which later dies in the book, just to make Pip suffer. “You was favored, and I was bullied and beat. Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh? Now you pays for it. You done it; now you pays for it” (807) This quote shows Orlick’s emotions and revengeful motives. He wants to kill Pip, make him suffer for what he “did” to him. He blames Pip for his failures and the cause of his miserable life. Through Orlick perspectives, Pip was always favored by Joe at the forge and had everything he wished for. He is jealous and holds a strong grudge that he attempts to kill him. Also, Orlick was never able to marry his dream girl, Biddy and just when he had a decent job at Satis House, he was fired because of Pip. Orlick’s abhorrence of Pip and Mrs. is very evident in the book. He baldy injures Mrs., causing her to die and attempts to kill Pip, which shows his vengeful motives.

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Lastly, another character who is motivated by revenge is Magwitch. He wants revenge on society and Compeyson. For this reason, he becomes Pip’s benefactor and gives him all of his fortune so Pip can become a worthy gentleman. As for his revenge on Compeyson, he gives up his freedom twice just to harm Compeyson. Magwitch got in business with a man called Compeyson. They committed felony by putting stolen notes in circulation and were arrested. At trial Compeyson betrayed him and made Magwitch face most of the blame. Additionally, because Compeyson acted and looked like a gentleman, he faced fewer years in prison, the jury was “nicer”. As a result, Magwitch was willing to do anything to get his revenge on Compeyson, even putting his freedom at risk. He could have escaped at the beginning of the story when Pip helps him out, but he saw Compeyson. Magwitch tackles him and they land in the water. This fight that alarmed the police. Due to this, the police arrested Magwitch, and he got sentenced for life. The following quote is a description of what happened at the trial. “When the prosecution opened, I noticed how heavy it all bore on me, and how light on him. When the evidence was given in the box, I noticed how always me that had come for’ard and could be swore to…. Compeyson was recommended to mercy on account of good character and bad company, and giving up all the information he could agen me and warn’t it me as got never a word but guilty? And when I says to Compeyson ‘ Once out of this court, I’ll smash the face of your’ ain’t it Compeyson as prays the judge to be protected and gets two turnkeys stood betwixt us?” (785). This quote demonstrates Magwitch’s feelings and thoughts that went through his head during the trial. He realized Compeyson had betrayed him and because of his appearance, he got fewer years of imprisonment. Magwitch had to sell all of his clothes to pay for a lawyer, Mr. Jaggers and was left with old clothes that made him look like he deserved more years in prison. For the second time, when he planned to escape in a steamboat, with Pip and Herbert’s help, he sees Compeyson again and decides to risk his freedom. He tackles him and they both sink into the water. Compeyson never comes back up and Magwitch is severely injured. At the end of the book he dies, as a result of his revenge on Compeyson. Magwitch chooses vengeance twice in the book instead of his freedom, which emphasizes his hate against Compeyson. He was willing to do anything just for the sake of watching Compeyson suffer just like he did.

In conclusion, Great Expectations has three characters who seek revenge against all. Miss Havisham, Orlick, and Magwitch go out of their way to seek revenge each in their own way. Miss Havisham uses Estella to watch men suffer after she was left at the altar by her fiance. Orlick has a grudge against both Mrs. Joe and Pip which lead him to attempt to kill both. Lastly, Magwitch wants vengeance against Compeyson, who betrayed him in many ways. Charles Dickens, in this novel, interprets revenge in a way that the reader understands its causes and effects. He believes that nothing positive comes from revenge, and can lead you to make unfavorable decisions. None of the three characters who sought revenge got something advantageous. It just leads them to make more hatred decision until there was no turning back.

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Great Expectations

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