Estella, Dead or Alive?: Consideration and Incrimination in Great Expectations

Only after Estella’s demise, I have argued elsewhere, “would [Pip] be free to relate his tale without paining her by proclaiming her true parentage and youthful coldheartedness” (1993, 50). Most likely, Estella Havisham (possibly Estella Pip) has passed away by the time the first installment of Great Expectations appears in All the Year Round. That best explains why Philip Pip (né Pirrip) waits to issue his combination memoir and bildungsroman for twenty years – from December 1840, when the last scene transpires in the “desolate” garden at Satis House (357; ch. 59), until 1 December 1860.¹ He refrains out of consideration for the feelings of one of the principal figures in his autobiography: the woman with whom he was obsessed and who may have become his wife.

Conceivably, Mr. Pip wrote his story in 1840 and simply postponed publication. In that case, in chapter 59, Pip really does not know what happened next and the novel’s final line is entirely accurate – whether it be “I saw the shadow of no parting from her” in all printings prior to 1862, or “I saw no shadow of another parting from her” (358; ch. 59) in the 1862 Library Edition. But given the allusion to Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) in the novel’s second paragraph, I propose that one should probably imagine Mr. Pip as a widower slightly older than Dickens – “about 56” to the latter’s 48 – “toiling over his manuscript” from week to week in 1861 and “facing old age alone” (1993, 50).²

If Estella is alive on 22 June 1861, she learns from chapter 50 that her father was Magwitch. “‘The man we have in hiding down the river is Estella’s father,”’ Pip informs Herbert in installment thirty’s final line (303; ch. 50). Estella would be mortified to discover that she is not “an elegant lady” as Pip called her when she came home from France (181; ch. 29). She can no more be considered genteel than a blacksmith’s stepson makes a bona fide gentleman. By rights she is not Estella Havisham, the adopted daughter of a wealthy, if eccentric recluse; instead, she should be addressed as Estella Magwitch, illegitimate child of a career criminal, who was transported to Australia. Five chapters further on, Estella would read about the consequences of her father’s illegal return, namely, his murder of Compeyson, the last in the long series of offenses for which he is sentenced to be hanged.

On 29 June, a week after learning her father’s identity, Estella would find out that Molly, Jaggers’s housekeeper, was her biological mother. Molly was acquitted of strangling a rival for Magwitch’s affections but was probably guilty. Even more disconcerting, this wild woman, to spite Magwitch, threatened to “destroy” their child (302; ch. 50). In back-to-back installments (30 and 31), Estella would discover that she is the progeny of “‘a returned Transport’” and a murderess, and that the latter was intent on killing her. Esther Summerson’s struggles with parentage in Bleak House pale in comparison.

“Even Mr. Jaggers,” normally imperturbable, “started,” reports Pip when, putting two and two together, he names both of Estella’s parents (305; ch. 51). Her discombobulation, were she still alive in 1861 and unprepared for such news, would doubtless have been even greater. When Magwitch manifests himself as Pip’s secret benefactor, Mr. Pip recalls how “the truth of my position came flashing on me”; “disgraces […] of all kinds rushed in in such a multitude that I […] had to struggle for every breath I drew” (240; ch. 39). Given an equally negative epiphany courtesy of Pip’s narrative, Estella would probably experience not just shock and embarrassment but also resentment upon realizing that Herbert, Jaggers, and especially Pip had known more about her parentage than she or Miss Havisham did. Such knowledge on Pip’s part makes Estella’s condescension to him in the first ending – she in a carriage, he on foot – and her coyness in the second ending seem faintly ludicrous: a convict’s daughter patronizing Pip...