On Christmas Eve a 7-year old orphan known as Pip' visits his family's graves in a Kent churchyard. It is early evening and fog is drifting in from the nearby marshes. Suddenly a terrifying escaped convict, with shackles still on his leg, seizes him. He threatens to kill Pip if he does not return with food and a file early the next morning. Pip runs in terror back to the forge that he lives in with Mrs. Joe (his strict sister) and her simple, kind-hearted husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. That evening Pip manages to smuggle some of his supper away from the table and, together with some other sustenance stolen from the pantry, he presents it to the man at dawn on Christmas day, after encountering another escapee. Later that day soldiers capture both convicts as they grapple in a ditch, and Pip's assailant generously takes the blame for taking the food. Pip is too scared to tell the truth.
Shortly afterwards Pip is summoned to Satis House (in the nearby town) by its owner, Miss Havisham. The pompous seed merchant Uncle Pumblechook drives him there. He is conducted into Havisham's presence by her haughty but beautiful young companion Estella. Havisham is an old lady who lives perpetually in her rotting wedding dress, surrounded by a decayed wedding feast that went uneaten when she was jilted at the altar years earlier. She loathes the male sex and has sent for Pip in order to enjoy the spectacle of Estella bullying him. In particular Estella ridicules his social class. On a subsequent visit he meets and fights Herbert Pocket, a young relation of Miss Havisham.
When Pip becomes old enough to be apprenticed to Joe, Havisham pays his premium. Soon afterwards Mrs. Joe is violently assaulted and gravely injured by an unknown assailant; Pip suspects the culprit to be Joe's surly assistant Orlick. Joe is obliged to employ a housekeeper, Biddy, as Mrs. Joe has been largely incapacitated by the attack.
Synopsis Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is the classic story of "rags to riches- seen from the eyes of a young boy, Pip. ... He has great expectations of himself as he tries to improve himself morally and socially. ... Time and Setting Great Expectation is set in early Victorian England, a time a great social change. ...