Introduction
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.
‘I WAS a poor boy then, as you know, and to a poor boy they were a little fortune. But, like you, I have done well since, and you must let me pay them back. You can put them to some other poor boy’s use.’ I took out my purse.
He watched me as I laid my purse upon the table and opened it, and he watched me as I separated two one-pound notes from its contents. They were clean and new, and I spread them out and handed them over to him. Still watching me, he laid them one upon the other, folded them long-wise, gave them a twist, set fire to them at the lamp, and dropped the ashes into the tray.*
‘May I make so bold,’ he said then, with a smile that was like a frown, and with a frown that was like a smile, ‘as ask you how you have done well, since you and me was out on them lone shivering marshes?’
‘How?’
‘Ah!’
He emptied his glass, got up, and stood at the side of the fire with his heavy brown hand on the mantel-shelf.
* Pip, and the reader, would assume that this was the action of a poor man but proud, saying ‘I don’t want your money’. But as we shortly find out, he is not saying this at all. In putting the money to the flame, Pip’s visitor signifies two things: the first is, ‘I have money to burn’; the second is, ‘This is my own money to burn’. The action states wordlessly everything Pip is about to discover.
Précis
In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip Pirrip lays out two pounds to rid himself of a visitor whom he remembers from many years before as a convict on the run. To his amazement, the man twists the notes into a spill, and burns them at the lamp, before going on mildly to ask how Pip came to be so well-to-do. (60 / 60 words)
In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip Pirrip lays out two pounds to rid himself of a visitor whom he remembers from many years before as a convict on the run. To his amazement, the man twists the notes into a spill, and burns them at the lamp, before going on mildly to ask how Pip came to be so well-to-do.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, may, must, or, otherwise, since, until, who.
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