Pip

Pip, born Philip Pirrip, is the narrator and protagonist of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Raised by his harsh older sister and her gentle blacksmith husband Joe Gargery on the Kent marshes, Pip is a poor orphan boy who, after a childhood encounter with the escaped convict Magwitch and repeated visits to the eccentric Miss Havisham and her ward Estella, receives an anonymous fortune that allows him to leave for London and live as a gentleman. Believing his mysterious benefactor to be Miss Havisham and his destiny to be marriage to Estella, Pip grows ashamed of his humble origins and increasingly neglects Joe, only to learn that his true benefactor is in fact the convict Magwitch, whose gratitude for Pip's childhood kindness funded his entire rise in society. The revelation forces Pip to confront his own snobbery, and the novel traces his gradual moral education toward humility and genuine loyalty. Pip's narration, written from an older and wiser vantage point looking back on his own youthful mistakes, is central to the novel's treatment of ambition, class and self-deception in Victorian England.