Great Expectations

The novel's climax unfolds when Pip and his friends attempt to smuggle Magwitch, his convict benefactor, out of England by rowboat to a steamer bound for Hamburg. Their plan is discovered: a police boat intercepts them, carrying Compeyson, the fraudster who long ago swindled Miss Havisham and who has now informed on Magwitch to collect a reward. Magwitch seizes Compeyson and the two fight in the river. Compeyson drowns, and Magwitch is pulled from the water badly injured and is arrested. Because he is a returned transport under sentence of death, Magwitch is condemned, and his considerable fortune reverts to the Crown, meaning Pip will inherit nothing after all. Before Magwitch dies in the prison hospital, Pip stays loyally by his side and tells him the one thing that brings him peace: that his long-lost daughter, whom Magwitch never knew, is alive, beautiful, and a lady — Estella herself, whom Pip has by now realized is Magwitch's daughter by Molly, Jaggers's housekeeper.

With his fortune gone, Pip falls seriously ill and is threatened with arrest for debt. Joe Gargery, the blacksmith who raised him with unwavering kindness despite Pip's earlier snobbery and neglect, comes to nurse him back to health and secretly pays off his creditors before quietly leaving. Once recovered, Pip resolves to return home and propose to Biddy, his childhood friend, only to arrive and discover she has just married Joe. Humbled, Pip apologizes to Joe for his past coldness, vows to repay his debt of kindness, and departs for Egypt, where his friend Herbert Pocket (whose position at the shipping firm Clarriker's Pip had secretly funded years earlier using Miss Havisham's money) has arranged a job for him. Pip lives with Herbert and his wife Clara, works hard, and eventually rises to become a partner in the firm, only then revealing to Herbert that he had been his secret benefactor all along.

Miss Havisham, before these final events, had confessed to Pip how she deliberately raised Estella to be cold and unfeeling as revenge on men after her own jilting, and she begged Pip's forgiveness, which he gave. Shortly afterward, her wedding dress caught fire and she was badly burned; Pip was injured trying to save her, and she later died from her injuries. Estella, meanwhile, married the brutish Bentley Drummle, who treated her cruelly until his death some years later.

After eleven years working abroad in Egypt, Pip returns to England and visits Joe and Biddy, now happily married with a young son they have named Pip after him. He then travels to the ruined grounds of Satis House, where by chance he encounters Estella, now a widow, humbled and changed by her suffering. She asks Pip's forgiveness, telling him that her hardships have finally taught her heart to feel. As evening falls over the moonlit ruins, Pip takes her hand, and the novel closes with his reflection that he sees no shadow of another parting from her, suggesting the two will remain together at last.