Hey everybody, welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know, this is AJ Hannenberg, known by my companions as the Fart, Fart, Wiggle, Wiggle, and he told me to bring the fun and said that's how I did it, Fart, Fart, Wiggle, Wiggle, so that's, I just figured I'd bring it right at the beginning here, and today, as we always do, we are discussing stocks, specifically a stock that has been falling pretty consistently for the past several years, GE. Oh, wow, that's unfortunate. Right, trying to get in aviation. All I know is they used to make light bulbs and get watchers.
Can I do a question? Yes. Are we going to introduce who we are? No.
Okay, we're just going to go straight in with our bit. Fine. All right, I'm AJ Hannenberg, I'm joined by Graham Donaldson and Thomas Magby. Thomas the Killjoy Magby, yeah, I'll take it, yeah, good, okay.
Keeps us on track, he's the straight man, I'm the fun one. So, yeah, that's what we're doing, our podcast is here to bring you the world of education in a way that isn't terrible, at least that's what we try to do, and so we talk about books and philosophy and art and all kinds of fun stuff, mostly books and philosophy and history and stocks. So, sometimes, in our in-between episodes we do a lot, too. Yeah, that's true.
How crypto relates to the faces of the moon, which is my favorite. You want to talk crypto all the time? It's the full moon today, it's October 20th, full moon, and a big coin hit an all-time high. I'm going to talk about Great Expectations.
Wow. Everyone on YouTube, their mind was just blown by you showing them the book. That's right. And it's a book by Great Expectations, it's by Charles Dickens.
It's a book that for years we taught at Veritas in the senior English curriculum. I thought you hated this book. I don't hate it, now that I haven't taught it, I actually miss it. I think, I don't know, I was thinking about it, because I didn't think about it for this episode, but I miss it.
Isn't this going to talk about like an ex? It's like you broke up and none of them are not around, you kind of, you know, you're around and you're around and you're at the top of your head. But objectively, it's still not a good relationship, so really, you shouldn't read the book again. Those are parts where it drags, and it just was not a fan favorite among the students, so that makes teaching a little bit difficult.
But when I think about it just as a novel, it's great. It's actually very, very funny. No, there's just really funny parts of it. Anyway.
Is it something that's funny the first time you read it, or does it take a while to? I think it takes a while. It's nice to fall in love with a couple of characters. I'm thinking of Wemmick.
Wemmick is the best bit in The Swearing Sailor. The Swearing Sailor, Wemmick, Joe, gosh darn it, I mean, he's just a delight. Anyway, we're going to talk a little bit about this book. But before we get into it, I have a question for you guys.
Say, tell me. When you boys were growing up, did you have a strong sense of other people's expectations on you? Did you have a strong sense of people expected something? Are there something really particular, like you were going to take over the family woodworking business, or anything?
Did you have a strong sense of expectations? You're the one with woodworking in the family? No to the woodworking, but, and hi, Mom. My mom told me I was special a lot, which is really nice, but I also felt the weight of some expectations there.
But to balance that out, all my friends expected me to be a weird idiot, so it kind of, I feel like they don't come out of a watch, right? So my mom expected me to be special, and my friends were like, you're a weirdo. And I was like, okay, I feel like I can thread that line perfectly. Well, you may be.
I don't think this is what you're asking, but it mattered that I do well academically, and so it was very important to me to get A's in my classes. I have the same, was that an explicit, people sat you down, looked you in the eye and said, this is what we expect? I have a distinct memory in seventh grade of the first time I got a B. My mother swears this never happened, but I have a distinct memory of this happening.
I brought home, for where we were, you had a report card every six weeks to make sure your grades are on track, and one of the six-week report cards for my seventh grade science class, which was like a notoriously difficult class, I'm justifying myself. Came back with a B, and my mom freaked out about this. That was the first B I'd gotten in school, as far as I don't remember. And the reason that she wasn't okay with a B is that a B is close to a C, and a C is close to failing.
So you can never get B. Wow, there you go. Yeah, so yes. So I remember that moment, and that kind of went with me forward.
I also just personally cared about my grades, but that's not the same as someone telling me I had to do well. Yeah, I mean, I just think about this, because in this book, this book's very interesting at the beginning, even just on like a child psychology or child development part. Maybe we're jumping ahead of ourselves. So let's set up the book a little bit.
The book is about a, it is a man looking back on his life, and that man's name is, unfortunately, Philip Pirip. That's a good nickname. Well, and because his name is... That's like somebody drunk is trying to call him Sirup.
That's right. And because his name is Philip Pirip, as a young boy, he could never say his name, and so he just called himself Pip, and everybody called himself Pip. Philip Pirip, so his name is Pip. Pip, his parents died when, I think he was the last kid to, he was the last surviving child, I can't remember if he was the youngest, but his parents died when he was quite young.
No, no, his sister, his sister raised him. So his parents died when he was young, and his sister took him in and raised him, and his sister was a number of years older than him, so that she was in her late teens, early twenties, when Pip was like a wee little four-year-old kind of kid. And she married a simple, good-natured blacksmith in town, and you get the sense that it wasn't magic love at first sight, but she needed a husband, he could have done with a wife at the forge, and it was a marriage of convenience because she needed a husband because she had this little kid brother that she was taking care of. And so she marries Joe, how did you always pronounce it, it's spelled, like it's pronounced Gagery, is that how you always pronounce it?
Gagery. Gagery, yeah. Gagery, anyway, so she's... I'm sure it was something fancy like Gagery.
No, he's not French. Oh, yeah, Tom, this book had a big... How did you always pronounce it? You read it.
Unfortunately, Joe's last name was not a part of the impactful part of the book, so, yeah. Anyway, Joe Gagery, his name is Joe, and so he always referred to his sister as by hand, and what this means, to the young mind of little Pip was, being raised by hand meant that she would smack the crap out of him, which is, in fact, what she did a lot. She would smack Pip, and she would spank him and raise him by hand. This reminds me of...
I have some friends, and when they were kids, their dad had this board that they would spank them with, and he called it the Board of Education, which is very funny, and for some reason, when I always hear that joke that Pip was raised by hand, I was saying the Board of Education, which is delightful. Anyway, and Joe always felt badly for Pip, and so he always tried to sort of, you know, compensate for Pip getting smacked around. On Christmas Eve, one day, Pip was out in the marshes looking at his parents' grave and sort of crying, and, you know, it was Christmas, and he said, and he happens to come across a convict, a man who has escaped from a prison boat, which I guess was a thing. Maybe prisons were overcrowded, and he just put them on boats.
That's exactly what happened. Their prisons were overcrowded, they had no more room, and so they used the barges that were nearby, and they took them, and then that was another place to keep prisoners, and they were apparently horrible places. The people died, got diseases, and the conditions were awful, so, yeah, that's what was happening. So when Christmas, Pip comes across a convict, who has clearly escaped from the prison, he's still got his shackles on, and he's near death, sort of having, like, gotten off the barge and, I guess, scrambled to shore somehow, and this convict gets a hold of Pip and basically terrifies the young boy into getting him some kind of some help, and Pip says he's going to go home, he's going to get some food for him, and he's going to get a file to help him file off his shackles, and the convict says, if you don't do it, I'm going to sick the tickler on you, and Pip doesn't like the sound of that, so he's like, I don't want the tickler anywhere close to me, and that sounds terrible, so, yeah, exactly, so, Pip goes home, steals Christmas dinner, it was a meat pie and a half a bottle of brandy, and takes and the file, and he didn't feel bad about stealing the meat pie and the brandy because it's from his sister's domain, and he doesn't really get along with his sister, but he does feel incredibly guilty stealing the file because it's Joe's domain, and he loves Joe, and Joe is a wonderful caretaker, anyway, he takes it back to the convict, who is pretty surprised that he's back with food in a file, he's like, oh, crap, it worked, and meanwhile, so he gives it to him, and the convict kind of goes from being cruel to being somewhat warm, not really, but somewhat warm, and says, thank you, lad, and all this kind of stuff, and Pip then, you know, the convict gets away, and then Pip goes home, there's this weird scene where he's pretty sure the convict and another man are fighting, and he doesn't really know what's going on, but anyway, Pip runs home, and then his theft is promptly discovered, although they never really know that Pip was in on it, because the pie was stolen and Joe's file was stolen, long story short, the convict is apprehended, and the convict doesn't rat Pip out, and Pip didn't rat the convict out, so there's this moment where the convict is caught, and it's known between the convict and Pip that they didn't rat each other out, and the convict's like, all right, cool, you're cool, kid, anyway, okay, cool, that is early on in Pip's life, and he felt super guilty that he stole Joe's file, one of my favorite scenes is that when Pip is returning to find a convict with Christmas dinner and a file, he feels like everybody's judging him and calling him a thief, and he walks by a cow, and he imagines the cow looks up at him and says, hello, young thief, because his conscience is eating away at him, and I feel like House would do that if they knew, I know, all right, fast forward a little bit, Pip is destined to become a blacksmith, because he's growing up in a blacksmith's house, he doesn't really think too much about it, and then lo and behold, one day, they get this letter from a lady, a noble lady, who lives in the town, and she requests that Pip comes to her house to entertain her, and everyone's like, what, this is weird, his name was put forward by some other person who's a character we don't really need to worry too much about, Mr., what's the shopkeeper's name, the doofus, oh man, like Pumblechuk, Mr.
Pumblechuk, I was going to say, it starts with P, yeah, anyway, so Pip goes to this lady's house, and her name is Miss Havisham, and do you boys remember what Miss Havisham's house is like? So, it's like, it's been frozen in time, essentially, and so there's like dust everywhere, and it's like, I want to say the clocks are literally frozen at a specific time, and all that comes up later, and is she wearing a wedding dress? She's wearing an old wedding dress. There's a cake on the table that's been there for forever?
Yeah, it's been there for forever, and beetles have eaten all that, and there's spiders everywhere. It's every mention that's ever been in a horror video game. That's right. Or if you can imagine, like, the Clue movie, except everyone just decides to go home, and then it stays that way.
Very good, exactly, yes. All the clocks have stopped, and she is wearing a wedding dress, and it looks like she's sort of half-dressed. She's got one stocking on, one stocking off, and the wedding dress is, like, caked and yellowed with age, and she's this, like, old lady, and Pip is terrified of her. Just to jump ahead, I thought it was obvious when you were ready for the first time that something happened with her wedding, she was jilted at the altar, and so then she decides that she's going to sort of, like, be a real crotchety about it, and, like, freeze everything, and hold it against the world.
Well, inexact for revenge eventually, right. And inexact for revenge eventually. She's not good at moving on. She's not good at moving on.
She needs, like, some, I feel like she had a book club or something. You used to have a brewery, the brewery's not working, and it doesn't seem like anybody's living or working there, except Miss Havisham. He bumps into someone. Doesn't he, like, fight the kid?
Oh, yeah, and there's a little kid that he fights. That's right. He's not connected with it. He's not.
Yeah, he is. He's distantly related to it, right? He's a pocket, yeah. He's a kid that Pip comes from with later.
Yeah. So this first time he goes to the house, Miss Havisham is invited there, and Miss Havisham wants Pip to entertain a young, beautiful girl named Estella. And Estella is hottie, proud. And she's also hottie.
Yeah, yeah. She's a hottie hottie. Anyway. Clumsy hands and big boots.
And when Pip plays a game of cards, she calls the cards after, like, the high-class names, and he calls them after, like, the low-class names, and they're playing a card called Beggar Thy Neighbor, which apparently is a real card game. And Pip uses all the, like, low cockney ways of talking about the cards, and she uses all the, like, the high-received pronunciation ways of talking about the cards. It's like, oh, no, no, no. Yeah.
And she makes fun of him with his clumsy hands and big boots. Right. And the effect on Pip is shattered. Right.
Absolutely shattered. And at the end of the day, she says, he is so upset by her that he goes outside and he tears out his hair and he, like, kicks the wall, and he's just ashamed that he's poor and common. Something he's never thought about or never even known about himself. Meanwhile, he sees this kid, this other little kid who's there, and he's like, hey, you want to fight?
And Pip's like, no, not really. And he's like, come on, let's fight. Fighting's like, what we do? And it's like, fine.
He literally, like, kicks the crap out of this kid. And the kid keeps getting up, and Pip keeps laying out, because he's like a blacksmith's kid. And he's a little fighter. He's like a young gentleman, and he's wanting to, like, prove himself, and he's using the right stance, and he's, like, got his fists to cuss up, and he's, like, you know, he's like, let's, let's put up the puss to cuss.
And Pip keeps, like, clocking him in the face, to the point where he is dizzy, and, like, I think, like, rouse behind a hedge at some point. Pip's like, we should stop. And this isn't fun. And meanwhile, so Pip sort of, like, savagely beats this kid.
And isn't it all good fun? Like, the guy's like, good show. He's like, good show, oh boy. And Pip doesn't want to be doing this, but meanwhile, Estelle is, like, looking out the window, and with, like, eyes on fire, and her cheeks are flushed, and clearly enjoying the violence, because she's a monster.
Anyway. You don't think so? I think so. Anyway, so she watches Pip beat up this guy, and then Pip comes back, and she's like, you may is forwarding, kisses her on the cheek, and she's like, you may go home.
And Pip's like, I hate her. But I love her. Rich girls, man. Rich girls will do that to you.
She's so dang stupid hot. Oh, I hate it. So Pip goes home, and he is immediately ashamed of where he's from. The forge, his clothes, the simpleness of Joe, who can't read.
Pip is ashamed and saddened. So Pip goes back to Havisham's house a number of times, and he starts to pick up that Havisham is, like, whispering things to Estelle, like, get him to love you, and then break his heart. Pip's like, I wonder what that means. He's like, oh, this is weird.
I mean, it's like, okay, when you were a little kid, did there any weird stuff happen around you? And you're like, this is certainly normal, because everything is weird to you. I remember that my great-grandma used to use her dishwasher as a shelf, and whenever I went there, she really didn't want me breaking all her really nice little figurines and clocks and things, and so she would sit me down, give me a little tuna can, fill it with Oreos, and there was a cookie at the bottom. And it never occurred to me that I could just move the Oreos and get straight to the cookie.
I was like, eat these flipping Oreos, get all the way down with the cookies. And she would occupy me for hours. Wait, you eat cookies to get to cookies? No, sorry, I eat Cheerios.
Oh. Eat Cheerios all the way down to a little vanilla wafer, and I did that for hours. And she would pull all of this stuff for this out of her dishwasher. The Cheerios and vanilla wafer, but I was fine.
I was like, this is perfectly fine. She's not trying to exact her revenge on the society of men. But if she was, I wouldn't have known. So, yes, Habisham, and it turns out, it's pretty obvious that Habisham has been breeding Estella.
She's too... Would you notice at this point? Oh, no, we don't. We don't.
It comes up later. But, I mean, you can put it together. You can put it together. And Habisham is like, get him to love you, and then break him.
She is. Well, tell him. Doesn't she look at him pretty early, and she's like, love her. Yes.
He's like, I want you to love her, and Pip's like, yeah, I'm way ahead of you. and um and so and then estella for pip for this poor kid um but he's in love with her and they play card games and he comes every day and when he comes home his sister is real curious as to what's going on pip invents all sorts of stories like we eat food off golden trays and i like sit on a dog and uh we're like a hot air balloon we ride in she's like that's crazy um anyway okay then one day he comes and finds and he comes to establish himself and estella's gone she's gone off to like rich girl school she's gone off to france or something to become even snotier and pip is devastated she's gone she's out of his life and pip starts having vicious pit all of a sudden in his mind decides he wants to be great he wants to be a gentleman and he wants to marry estella he doesn't want to be a blacksmith he wants that girl he wants that girl and so even though she's terrible he loves her and he decides i don't know why but i kind of want to be a gentleman like have a show so i can marry estella but i'm not because i'm a blacksmith's kid anyway uh a few years past and pip grows up and he's like 14 or 15 or something and he's getting pretty uh blacksmithy and you know like joe's teaching all the things he just doesn't like it he's like it's fine but i don't you know he's tasted the good life or he's out of the good life he's tasted something different i mean what kid doesn't have that feeling yeah exactly um and then um uh there's some serious events we really need to talk about it mrs joe gets attacked and uh bonked on the head and becomes an invalid um by somebody that had been dissed who worked at the forge and had been sort of um he was a jerk and was dismissed because he's a jerk and he came back later and bonked mrs joan he's slouchy he's slouchy person he describes him as slouching all over the place he's slouching in the yard he's slouching in the kitchen and this guy really hates pip and because he thinks that pip has kind of you know sold him out anyway all right um and then one day uh joe and pip are at the pub just having a couple of having a couple of pints um and this uh lawyer comes in and he says uh he is a trial lawyer everyone's terrified of him because he puts everybody in jail and he always wins his cases and he comes in he's looking for pip oh jaggers oh we don't the lawyer we'll talk about that later because that's when pip goes to his house so the lawyer's name is jaggers um uh and he i'm trying to like a rolling stones joke but it doesn't matter um and so jaggers comes and he's like listen uh i've got some crazy news are you pip and he's like yeah um and he says um you are you've inherited like this insane fortune right and you're gonna get it when you come of age and um you are to come with me uh there's a benefactor mysterious benefactor i can't tell you who it is don't ask me i'm not gonna tell you but i know who it is don't ask um and the mysterious benefactor said that you need to come to london and learn to be a gentleman and then when you're a gentleman you're gonna be insanely rich and live in gentleman land and pip's like this is incredible where'd this come from in his mind he's like miss havisham did this and she wants me to marry stella yeah she clearly means me for she clearly means me for the lady she did this um um i mean i don't blame him for putting that together she was saying love her and then they felt a weird windfall of cash and then he's like uh okay i wouldn't ask who my benefactor is but thank her for me and jaggers like shut up don't ask me questions jaggers is awesome and he's cold and um he's amazing yeah he said he watches his hands a lot um and so he watches his hands a lot so then pip then uh goes home he's like hey joe guess what bye um and it's hard it's very sad but pip doesn't realize that it's sad and there's this other person who was like pip's kind of tutor who kind of loves pip and he's a real like cab to her he's like maybe one day you can marry somebody common not me though i'm a gentleman and she's like you're the worst he's just he's he he becomes really mean and so um he's perfect for so uh he's got all this money he's kind of burned his bridges at home um she's like you could be with me and he's like i don't want to be so common yeah yeah yeah uh so there's this girl uh the name biddy yes uh i was gonna say tilly no it's biddy biddy clearly loves pip and she um uh says well you know i think pip even tells her about stella and biddy's like she sounds like a real piece of work why don't you go for someone closer to home and nice and he's like sorry betty i'm going for veronica um and uh oh sorry uh biddy not betty and the joke was great yeah um so he's going out for the rich girl and biddy stays at home and um pip's a real real jerk back there okay then that's sort of like part one of the book then the book shifts to london pip goes to london and he goes straight to a private tutor to teach him to be a gentleman and the private tutor's name is mr pocket we don't need to know that the only reason i mention that is because mr pocket is one of hanberg's favorites because i am mr you are mr pocket um um he yanks on his hair which is a thing that i do all the time he's kind of absent-minded he's delightful he's good natured he's a great guy um what is he teaching pip is it just like all sorts of things yes school classes he's a tutor english math all these sorts of things and pip's like whatever is there an still at the end of this um and so he is doing all these classes and jaggers is watching over him there's other students and one of the students that pip comes friends with is this kid named her pocket matthew pocket's son and uh it's the boy that pip kicked crap out of all those years ago and so pip and her pocket become best of friends and her pocket in a very weird aristocratic way gives pip nicknames what does he call him i can't remember um like flopsin or something it doesn't matter uh all i remember is that like her was like i'm gonna call you pip i'll call you flopsin or give him some name um they become the best of friends they live it up uh pip gets an allowance from his benefactor and um and pip proceeds to absolutely blow through his money as fast as possible he does not know how to spend it he starts getting into massive debt because he's buying expensive things and he's like stella likes rich boys and i gotta be rich and poor pocket is not he doesn't have the money to do all this right and her pocket is from an aristocratic family that has no money which is why they're taking in tutors or two kids who are taking in students and so pip's like hey let's go buy like golden covered hamburgers pocket's like all right not again but okay um it's his job he kind of works as a clerk at this and he's like a shipping agency and he's like so what are you doing he's like just getting the lay of the land look at all my prospects i just gotta put my feelings up and find out find out when my shot is and my chances he's waiting for his one chance to pull his capital and he's like i'm doing that and he's like for about five years he's just hasn't been way too long and pip's like that sucks you know you should do just get it all at once yeah okay have you tried being rich tried not being poor um so then meanwhile stella comes back all grown up and she's beautiful and she's still ice cold right and she's mean but she's gorgeous and she's back and pip and she's like oh pip i remember you your boots aren't so big anymore and he's like i have the tiniest shoes ever um and um and pip eventually sort of like it's not very good at keeping it cool and is pretty obviously in love with her and follows around and at some point she's like listen stop i can't love you oh she's like no don't take a person i can't love anybody and um uh she's like all i'm gonna do is hurt you just leave me alone i can't love you and pip's like that's that's what we're gonna say right he's like i think she wants me to love her more yeah exactly right isn't that what we actually kind of how responds like she's clearly trying to draw me on that's right and so and then a rival starts to appear and there's this kid who is like better than pip and comes from a great family and but his nickname is the spider because he sort of that's just how he lives he sort of sits there and broods and jaggers is like that kid's that kid's like uh he's a spider that kid um you got like narrow eyes and a little thick neck yeah and um but he's clearly like the best of the crop of aristocratic kids and he's interested in and he's interested in stella obviously because she's beautiful and he's a jerk bag of the man for each other um okay um then uh pip is sort of living at large waiting for to be turned to turn the time when the age when this house is going to give him his fortune and this guy shows up and the guy who shows up is the convict and the convict it comes into pip's house one day he's like hello there kid um my name is megwitch that's his name his name is megwitch which sounds like some kind of sandwich the megwitch if you had put a sandwich with your name on what would be on the megwitch unfortunately i think the reuben is already the purpose of which so i would just i need to make one tiny addition to it and i can make it my own could you swap the meat out for lamb because wasn't this guy raising sheep so yeah megwitch um so megwitch um as one does got banished to australia for his crimes and when he was there instead of languishing in work camp became a sheet millionaire go figure exactly so he's raised a giant flock of sheep and became like sinking rich you referenced before this might be tangent that you don't want to go down but um because he's writing this to be the outcome when he revealed it was you know i mean like he revealed it was a benefactor he made the choice of a benefactor long before he made the choice of who the benefactor was yeah maybe it's set up it's when he misses it's so yeah so it's it's the guy that he stole the pie in the file for and i think it's set up way earlier he knew that that guy was always going to win money yeah there's a scene before uh um pip gets learned about the benefactor where there's this weird dude that shows up that's kind of like spying pip out and it's clearly either megwitch or megwitch's cronies just to see if pip's still alive and still doing his thing and still where he is so it seems like the seed for planted so anyway so megwitch shows up and he's like um i only had one thought while i was raising all those sheep in australia and that was to get super rich and make you a gentleman because i thought it'd be hilarious like if you were a gentleman well fine i wanted to pay you back for your kindness i wanted to pay you back for your kindness but also i kind of wanted to like stick it to rich people and rich people would be real upset if like a blacksmith's kid was richer than them yeah and also funded by convict yeah funded by convict uh uh what isn't that a laugh and pip's like yeah pip is crushed by this because he knows that havesham isn't setting him up to marry estella correct that whole motivation is gone now yeah he's got dirty sheep money yeah he's got dirty sheep money he doesn't want yeah at first he thought it was havesham that would set him up and if havesham set him up and like estella is as good as his now it's like no this dude that like looks like he's like a sheep herder and he's real crass he's real crass and he swears a lot and he's um he farts on the carpet and he's super into pip he loves pip as a son and pip's like that's really kind and he feels for megwitch but also like you can't bring him to a party you know like you can't let him know that this is your benefactor jeggers is like i told you not to talk about it i don't know nothing about this also megwitch isn't really supposed to be back in england yeah this is the part why i always get confused because they're eventually trying to sneak him back out is it because he's a he's escaped he was banished australia under the guise of he can't come back but he's an exile he's an exile but he's like dude i just had to see you and all your fancy clothes stick into the rich people i just had to see it it's like okay that's kind of nice um okay then this absolutely crushes pip um and then uh estella is going to marry the spider and pip's not the benefactor for this and so he um goes and confronts havesham and um a long story short finds out that havesham was supposed to marry this guy and this guy jilted her at the off altar and took all her money in cahoots with her brother leaving her basically like with not a lot of cash she still was an aristocrat but kind of stole her prospects um never loved her just pretended to love her more importantly stole her heart stole her heart left her at the altar and she at that moment decided that she was gonna do everything in her power to create a banshee of hatred that was going to wreak havoc on the society of men so she raised stella with the intention of turning her into a loveless robot and what was going to have boys fall in love with her and then systematically crush their dreams and so um this is why estella who actually probably feels something for pip is like pip stay away stay away because um the whole point is that i'm supposed to like hurt people's feelings um i'm good at it and i'm good at it and estella and have a great scene where estella sort of like blames havesham for all this and havesham's like estella why won't you obey me and love me and estella's like you raised me not to love anybody and estella's like so i'll do what you want i'm gonna marry this fighter but we're not cool like bye i don't want to be in your life anymore i'm taking his money i'm never seeing you again and havesham's like oh hoisted by my own petard um and then do you know what that means no no i looked it up recently because it came up in a book and it came up in one of my books that's where it came from so it means basically blown up by your own explosive device hoisted to be blown up and a petard is like a bomb oh there you go cool um anyway so she yes uh abandons her and pip confronts her and um and i'm blanking on the scene so pip confronts her uh miss havesham sort of lays out everything of what happened um and then uh steps a little too close to the fireplace oh she asks pip for forgiveness um pip confronts her and says you know you used me that was really mean and uh havesham's like well so you're you're poor uh and pip's like i thought you were giving me money she's like no i paid for your um you're like blacksmith course um and she's like it's not my fault you read into all this stuff and um pip's like well i just wanted you to know that um it's sort of no hard feelings but that was really mean you should have done that and um havesham steps too close to the fireplace and her old uh wedding dress catches on fire and she runs around bursting flames and pip puts her out and uh she's near death she pretty much uh is almost dead she gives her the medical attention that she needs and um in the moment of her death she asks pip for forgiveness and he forgives her which is very kind um but havesham sort of her house was a tinderbox anyway because of all those old things you had lying around and so she sort of has this tragic end of being bursting in flames okay i really think that's the moral of the story is just fire safety yeah uh okay and then um we'll sort of where we are on the uh okay so um pip has a moment of there's this we haven't been talking about this on this plot pip has this moment of realization that he's been an absolute jerk bag um just a jack wagon to joe back home because um once joe came to visit him and pip is like joe i'm gonna make you a gentleman stop being a blacksmith i'm gonna send you to school and make you smart and you're gonna wear fancy clothes and joe's like nope that's not my life my life is back home mrs joe she's died of her injuries and meanwhile joe has married biddy uh this is a good-hearted uh country girl who is in love with pip has married joe and they're very happy together and joe's sort of living his simple country life which is great because joe's wonderful and there's this weird gulf they can no longer cross again yes they can't be friends anymore because pip has sort of grown up and he's been a huge jerk and he's in this different world and joe's unwilling to enter into that world even for the love of pip which i think is really interesting right rightfully so i think he doesn't want to he's happy in his nature and he doesn't want to go against his nature because pip isn't willing to cross the bridge yeah pip wants to be something other than he is right and pip's got i'm sorry joe's got this little great metaphor this way he talks to pip when pip says like hey joe why don't you just like leave the forge and come hang out with me i'll just be like all the times except we're rich and um joe says no i'm not right here i'm not writing these clothes i'm not writing this town he says um life is like different pieces of metal welded together this is what joe says which makes sense because he's a blacksmith and this is what he knows i wonder how often he's used that metaphor well i just wonder if it's like a horse car is like pieces of metal welded together you know chess chess is like pieces of metal welded together but i mean you go with what you know right like how many football coaches use like everything's a game of inches life's about getting that extra yard right um if you go with what you know so joe gives pip this metaphor and he says life is like different kinds of pieces welded together sometimes there's gold sometimes there's life and different chapters have these different things we had gold and now we have silver uh we can't recreate the past i'm going home and pip just feels awful because he brought it on himself he was a real jerk bag to joe and baby when he left he was like i'm off to face my destiny uh it turns out his destiny was not what he thought it was and when he tries to go back and relive the past he can't do it right just to make sure so part of this happens earlier in the book where joe was brought to london and soon around town there's also the part after they try and get this escape from a witch So, Pitt has this realization of there's this moment where he has near death where he gets kidnapped by the guy that conked his sister and he's going to kill her and then he gets saved by a guy who has a hilarious name of Star Top. We haven't talked about him. He's awesome.
Anyway, so Pitt gets saved and he doesn't die but has this realization that he's been living a terrible life and he wants to go back to the way things were. Meanwhile, he's got Megwitch. He's got to get Megwitch out of town. And the guy that Megwitch Megwitch's rival, whose name is Kampasen, is also in town.
Kampasen turns out to be the person that Havisham was going to marry and took off with all her money. It's also the same guy who was on the convict ship that Megwitch fought right at the beginning of the book. This is a Dickinson novel, you guys. Everybody knows everybody.
It's a real convenience. It's not like that where it's like, we just wanted to tie up the book at the very end. It's a small island. It feels like a little bit of plot manipulation there.
So Kampasen, who was going to marry Havisham, is the rival to Megwitch and they're trying to get Megwitch out of town and Kampasen's going to rat them out. There's a fight on a boat and Megwitch and Kampasen drowns. Megwitch gets run over by a steamboat and bonked on the head by an oar and he almost dies and he does die and has this touching moment where he tells Pip that he loves him and Pip's like, you know, it feels bad that Megwitch dies. And now Pip's got all this money.
Megwitch is dead and Pip's like, I'm going to go home and relive my old life. I'm going to go marry Biddy. She was the person I should have married all along. He doesn't know Biddy's married Joe.
Pip goes home ready to marry the girl who loved him when he was a child and he comes home and Joe's there and Biddy's there and she's like, Pip, I'm married to Joe. In fact, we just got married this afternoon. Pip's like, god crap. Again, real convenient.
And then Pip that's essentially where the book ends. There's two endings that come later. So Pip then decides that he's going to live a simple life. He's obviously not going to go marry Stella and be this swashbuckling, awesome adventurer.
Hasn't he kind of burned through his cash, too? He's burned through his cash a little bit. Like, don't they find out that Megwitch is a... The government takes the cash back because the government finds out that this convict had come back and all the money was his and so the government's like, yoink!
And there's another character who I haven't talked about who's one of my favorites, named Wemek, who basically gives Pip a giant, I told you so, the government's always coming for your cash. You should have bought gold bars, buddy. Hey, pause. Can we talk for...
He's my favorite character. Can I just talk for a second? Let's just put a bow on. So, and then Pip doesn't have very much money and him and what's his name?
Pocket, Herbert, go in business together and they become little, like, basically shipping guys. And so they start a little shipping company. Pip lives in India for a while, comes back. Biddy and Joe have a little baby boy that they named Pip, which is very cute.
And then the book ends. Well, I'll finish the book and we'll come back to Wemek because he sort of maybe opens up a big conversation. The book ends with Pip and little baby Pip going for a walk one day to the house, the crazy house where all this happened, and Pip realizes, oh, the house is gone. And while he's there, Estella shows up.
This is the original... This is the added ending. And Estella shows up and she's like, Pip, I married the spider and he was terrible. She doesn't say this, we learn this.
She married the spider, he was terrible, he used to beat Estella. Estella had a horrible life. Luckily for Estella, her husband died when he mistreated a horse and kicked him in the face. And she then ended up marrying the doctor who treated all of her injuries that she got from getting beaten up by her husband.
And he's like, hmm, this doesn't look good. And he marries her, he doesn't have very much money, and she sort of lives this poor life with this doctor who seemingly cares for her. She sees Pip and she says, you know, Pip, can you ever forgive me? I was cruel, but I'm no longer cruel.
The difficulties of life have taken the cruelty out of me. And Pip kind of has, in my opinion, he sort of has this lackluster, milquetoast, like, yeah, I can forgive you, but he doesn't, I don't know. What's your take on it, maybe? That they fall in love, and it's a beautiful ending, and everything is happy in the end.
That's not true. Isn't she Magwitch's daughter? Oh, gosh, we forgot about that. No, my word.
Yes. She's also Magwitch's daughter. I'm a convict. Turns out she's a gypsy child.
We're not being funny. Yeah, I forgot about all that. This is one of the reasons that this book made me cranky, is all of the real convenient coincidences. That's why I also think that the book eventually turns happy, right?
They reconcile all life is good afterwards. They reconcile, I don't think they get married. So it says, so here's the ending that Dickens was forced to write because the original ending was a bummer. Yeah, it was, yeah.
So he was forced to write this, and she says, but she said to me, returned Estella very earnestly, God bless you, God forgive you. And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now, now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but, I hope, into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.
We are friends, said I, rising and bending over her as she rose from the bench, and we will continue friends apart, said Estella. I took her hand in mine, and we ran out of the ruined place, and as the morning mist had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her. See? It's love.
That's not love. She's their friends. They end up with theirs together forever. Apart.
She said we'll be friends apart. That's the very end. Shadow of no parting. This is the problem, is that nobody knows what that means.
I saw the shadow of no parting from her, so either he sees an indication that he gets to stay with her, the shadow of it, I see the shadow, maybe I can stay with her, maybe there, or he sees the shadow of it, and he'll never have it. It's just sort of there in the background, what could have been. Oh, I saw the shadow of no parting. He just has a little bit of a glimpse of what it could have been like if he doesn't.
Yeah, so there's a bunch of different ways it could be understood, and that kind of drives me a bit. It does drive me a bit. I love the older, but I had to be forced to write it, so of course it would make it annoying, right? Yeah, the original ending is that Pip and little Pip are in London one day, and a carriage stops by, and Pip realizes that it's Estella, and they sort of have this little look, and she basically, like, Pip has learned that she's had a really hard life, and when he sees her in the carriage, he gets a sense that she seems to have softened, and he thinks, oh, maybe the suffering of the world has made her, has turned her to a better shape, and given her a heart that understands what my heart used to be.
So he sees Estella, and he says, he sees like the girl he hasn't seen in a long time he used to be in love with, and he's like, she looks like she's doing okay. Not great, I heard that she had a rough marriage, but she seems to be doing all right. And it seems that she assumes that little Pip is Pip's son, so she assumes that Pip has gone off and found love, so she's like, okay, he's found somebody. And that's the original ending, I love that ending.
I think that ending's great. That's terrible. This other ending is confusing, we don't know what's going on. I don't mind ambiguous endings.
One of my favorite novels, The Magus by John Fowles, is that you don't know which ending it is. He leaves it ambiguous whether the people get together or not, but he writes it well enough. This one just seems like needless shadowy obfuscation, where I'm kind of frustrated that he didn't just write it more clearly. I think Carlton was forced to do it.
He did not want it to end that way, is what it sounds like. There's lots of different paths of really interesting inquiry that you can take with this book. One is comparing it to Gatsby, which we do at the school, because you've got two similar kinds of characters, people that are poor, that suddenly become rich, that have these desires that go unmet and unfulfilled. Gatsby ends up dead in a swimming pool, Pip ends up like a middle-class shipping baron.
Those are like, to me, highlight America and England. One's a very American story of extremities, and one's a very British story of like, you know, the good life is knowing your place and staying there, right? That's right, because I imagine that would be a message you appreciate. You've talked about ambition a few times on the podcast, and it seems like a warning.
It's a warning against great expectations. Yeah, I think that Pip comes to a conclusion about what the good life is, but the other sort of harrowing thing to think of is that what it took for him to learn that was the destruction of it. He couldn't go back and get bit. He couldn't go home and live there again.
He couldn't go back to the thing that he had, and now he kind of has to make do with building that somewhere else with his friend Herbert Pocket and building this little business job of his. And so there's almost like a cautionary tale, too, of, you know, if you take risks, if you do go out, if you try to sort of punch above your weight or push beyond your lot, you could wreck where you've come from. It's one way to think. It's one way to interpret it.
I don't think he would have been happy with Biddy. No, you don't? I don't think that him going... I don't remember specifically the ending, so please tell me when I'm wrong about this, but he continues in the shipping business.
He does. That's not the, like, at-home life that Biddy and Joe have. Correct. He's gone to India.
He travels a lot. He will need to find someone else who is okay with that life as opposed to Biddy, who wouldn't be. That's right. I think he has this...
In both cases, he's romanticized. Yes, he's romanticized what it is to be a gentleman, and then he's romanticized what it is to be a common person, and he actually ends up existing somewhere in the middle between those two. He's not kind of the, you know, the leaderly rich who don't do anything with their life, and he's not a blacksmith working every day. He's an entrepreneur, business owner, whatever.
Yes, maybe that's a good way to think about it, is the dangers of romanticizing things, the dangers of sort of, like, building a story for yourself and then trying to live that story where it doesn't correspond to reality is a recipe for not being very happy, either on the gentleman end or on the blacksmith end. Yeah, I mean, it seems like a pretty common coming-of-age story where you sort of loathe the thing you were and romanticize all the things you weren't. No, no, that's good. And I mean, this happens with every person, right?
You think your parents are kind of foolish pumpkins, and then you think... Yeah, so even if you're rich, you're like, man, I wish I could, like, get into the real meat of life and not be so protected, and you find out, well, that actually kind of sucks. And if you're poor, you think, man, if I could just have some money, everything would be great, and then you realize, well, that's not that great either. And I feel like it's just something everybody has to go through at some point, is realizing that, wow, I thought this other life was going to be cool, it's just not.
But I think that's your point of you then have to go through that crushing moment of getting the thing you want. Like, the tragedy of Pip is that he gets the saddest he wants, he gets the wealth he wants, he gets miserable, he then has it all forcibly taken away from him, so at the point where he could use his wealth better, he no longer has it. You know what I mean? It still feels like a tragedy each step of the way, even though I think he's immeasurably better off in the end, even in the bad end of it.
For sure. His life is better than it was if he had stayed a blacksmith or a state of gentleman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, there you go.
So there is a, I mean, Pip's life is definitely marked with sort of like serendipity. There's nothing that Pip usually does to get himself, you're right, his ending is happy, and it's happy almost in spite of him. And just as his wealth was, he got it in spite of himself. And so Pip kind of like, you know, stumbles upwards.
Isn't he not happy for Joe and Biddy? He does, very much. I need to fix this. Biddy's my solution.
And thank goodness she had married Joe that afternoon, or else Biddy would be miserable. Yes, right. She was the one person that loved me back in the day. I'm going to go.
Yeah, just asking to recreate the past. So maybe we save Wemmick for the in-between. So you like this book a lot. This book has been kind of like on a, was one of those books for you, right?
Yeah, eventually. What was the topic or what was the theme that really sort of resonated? Again, I think at this point it's an in-between conversation, but in what you are talking about right now, there are these three different views toward one's work and one's personal life, I guess. So three kind of approaches to how to either balance those or how to look at both of those.
The Jaggers, the Wemmick, and the Joe kind of thing. Yeah, I think that those set up, I think the book very clearly has a view on which one is right. I think it's more complicated. And this discussion is showing me it's more complicated because Pip doesn't end up neatly into one of those categories at the end.
I guess it doesn't say whether he's like a Jaggers and a Skrull and a Carter because he could be. We don't know. I think that sounds like another, yeah, that's going to feed into a great in-between episode. So just to sort of finish it, the book is delightful.
The characters are memorable. If you've read Dickens, I will say, I did not like this book the first time I read it in high school it was required reading. I liked it very much when going through AJ's great books course in six years. That was when I read it and it meant something more to me.
I don't think it's a book that this is probably what you experienced with seniors. It's not really for seniors. No. You need to have left something.
You need to have taken a risk and kind of grappled with the meaning of that. And sat in the way to that risk for a while to see it kind of play itself out in your life a little bit. Which is why I think some of the more fruitful conversations I had with seniors in this book were when Pip was a little child and the way that little child sees the world and then is influenced by the world is kind of a really fascinating thing at the beginning. And then also to, yeah, where do our, this is why I wanted to start the podcast with that question.
I think most kids grow up feeling like they have expectations on them. But as you get older, at least this is my case, when I go back and I kind of tease out those expectations, I think like 80% of them were ones that I kind of seemed to have made up for myself or just sort of absorbed from the world around me. I can't remember a time where my parents sat me down and said, we really want you to succeed and go to college. But there was an expectation.
And so like, where did the genesis of our thoughts about what we want in our life? Where do those things come from? For Pip, it was one moment of a pretty rich girl telling him that he was sucked. And that's an interesting question of like, if we go back and do what Pip is doing, which is at the end, not the end of his life, at the end of a big chapter of his life, he's looking back on his past and tracing through his development.
If we were to do that to ourselves, do we have biggest fellow moments or not? Where do our views of what we think a good life is or the expectations that we put on ourselves, how do those things kind of develop? I think it's a really fascinating question. And I think something worthwhile for each individual person to kind of like do that kind of self-reflection.
Because if you don't and if you just run on autopilot, well, Pip didn't really have any sort of self-reflection until everything kind of exploded. He went back and was like, oh, these are all the mistakes I made. Could Pip have avoided some of that heartache had he been a little more self-reflective younger? I don't know.
I think it might be no. Yeah, you're right. The answer might be no. Yeah, I don't think about that.
Anyway, that's a great expectations. Right, well, this has been Classical Stuff. You should know. The in-between episodes that Graham was talking about, you can find on our Patreon page, which is patreon.com slash classical stuff.
Nailed it. And you can support us there. At the low levels, you just get commercial-free episodes, which you're probably getting right now anyway. And then if you bump up to the higher episodes, you get sort of our in-between episode banter and then there are extra goodies after that if you are interested.
Monthly AMA, so people at the middle tier can ask us questions that we'll answer usually more than an hour long. Oh yeah, I think our last one was like an hour and a half. It was super long, but they're really fun. Anyway, you can also email us at theguysatclassicalstuff.net.
You can tweet at us at clsscalstuff. And then I think, oh, and our website, classicalstuff.net, you can check us out there. And I think that's it. So this is The Boys from Classical Stuff signing off.
Bye, bye, bye.