Violence Comes Home — Great Expectations

Pip's lessons with the great-aunt end once Biddy has given him everything she knows, down to a comic song about London. He then tries to teach Joe at the old Battery, with a broken slate and a pipe, because he wants the blacksmith less ignorant and less open to Estella's contempt. Joe remembers nothing from one Sunday to the next and still looks pleased to be learning. Lying on the earthwork, Pip sees Miss Havisham and Estella in every sail, and he asks for a half-holiday to call on them. Joe agrees only if the visit is thanks and nothing more. Miss Havisham has already said the apprenticeship payment was all. Pip nearly says Estella's name, and Joe stops him.

Orlick, the journeyman, has disliked Pip since the apprenticeship began, and he treats the holiday as a slight. He demands the same afternoon, swings a red-hot bar around Pip's head, and calls Mrs Joe a foul shrew when she listens from the yard and screams that Joe is wasting wages. Joe asks him to come on. They fight in their aprons, and Orlick ends in the coal-dust. Mrs Joe has watched. She drops senseless at the window and will only revive enough to clutch Joe's hair. By the time Pip comes downstairs the two men are sweeping and sharing a pot of beer. Joe sees him off with the remark that life is on the rampage and then off it.

At Satis House, Sarah Pocket opens the gate, and Estella is not there. Miss Havisham tells Pip he will get nothing, then laughs and asks whether he feels he has lost Estella. She is abroad, being educated for a lady, prettier than ever, and admired by everyone who sees her. He leaves more ashamed of home and of the trade than when he arrived. In the High Street, Mr Wopsle seizes him and reads George Barnwell aloud in Mr Pumblechook's parlour until half-past nine, casting the apprentice as a boy who murders the relation who helped him. Mr Pumblechook stares as if Pip were already planning the same crime.

The walk home is dark and wet. They meet Orlick by the turnpike. He says he spent the holiday in town, close behind Pip, and that the guns are firing at the Hulks because convicts have escaped. At eleven the Three Jolly Bargemen is lit and open. Mr Wopsle runs out: the house was violently entered while Joe was away, convicts are supposed, and somebody has been hurt. The kitchen is full of the village, a surgeon, and Joe. Mrs Joe lies on the boards without sense or movement, knocked down by a blow on the back of the head from an unknown hand while her face was turned to the fire. She is not going to be on the rampage again while she is Joe's wife.