Great Expectations (novel)

Pip receives a visitor from among the criminal classes, but his condescending attempt to play the gentleman rebounds spectacularly.

One night, Pip Pirrip, now twenty-three, opens the door of his London apartment and finds a rough-looking man of about sixty outside. This alarming visitor asks him to recall helping a sorry convict, hunted down by the police on the Kent marshes sixteen years before. Uncomfortably, Pip does, and also remembers that the convict had afterwards sent him two pounds. A thought befitting a gentleman then strikes him.

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Pip Pirrip never misses a moment of visiting time with Abel Magwitch, the convict who made him into a gentleman, in the prison hospital.

Pip Pirrip has finally met the anonymous benefactor who made him a gentleman – a transported felon, Abel Magwitch, illegally back in Britain just to see him. But shock and disgust have given way to pity and respect; and now Abel lies in a prison hospital, unlikely to trouble the hangman, Pip never misses a minute of visiting hour.

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