The voices of Great Expectations
12 voices in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Every one is a separate voice, cast to the character as written.
- Narrator — Adult Pip's retrospective narration — measured, rueful, sometimes affectionate, looking back on the great expectations that shaped and nearly ruined him.
- Pip — Philip Pirrip — Pip — an orphan blacksmith's boy whose unexpected inheritance transforms him into a London gentleman. His journey from humility to snobbery to hard-earned wisdom.
- Joe Gargery — Pip's gentle blacksmith brother-in-law — the emotional heart of the novel. Unlettered, loyal, entirely without guile. His love for Pip is unconditional and undeserved.
- Herbert Pocket — Pip's cheerful, financially optimistic best friend in London — eternally projecting prosperity he doesn't have, endlessly supportive, genuinely happy.
- Estella — Miss Havisham's beautiful ward, raised to break men's hearts. Cold, precise, honest about her inability to love, and eventually broken by her own training.
- Miss Havisham — The eccentric recluse of Satis House who stopped all the clocks at the moment she was jilted on her wedding day, and has worn her rotting dress ever since. Bitter, theatrical, ultimately regretful.
- Mr. Jaggers — The formidable London lawyer who manages Pip's great expectations. Intimidating, precise, washing his hands constantly, who neither confirms nor denies anything.
- Wemmick — Jaggers's clerk — a man of two faces: the professional automaton at the office and the devoted son in his eccentric home-fortress in Walworth.
- Abel Magwitch — The escaped convict Pip helped as a boy — who turns out to have been Pip's anonymous benefactor all along. Gruff, fierce, deeply grateful, ultimately tragic.
- Biddy — Pip's childhood friend — sensible, quietly loving, and the person who ends up with the happiness Pip discarded in his pursuit of greatness.
- Mrs. Joe — Pip's harsh older sister who raised him 'by hand' — abrasive, dominant, deeply resentful of her domestic life. Struck down mid-novel.
- Mr. Pumblechook — Joe's pompous, self-important uncle who takes credit for all Pip's good fortune and is a supreme comic hypocrite.