CHAPTER 21 Great Expectations

Q: What happens in Chapter 21 of Great Expectations?

In Chapter 21, Pip walks through London with Mr. Wemmick, Jaggers's clerk, who escorts him to his new lodgings at Barnard's Inn. Pip is dismayed to find the Inn is not a respectable hotel but a decaying, squalid collection of shabby buildings around a gloomy courtyard. Wemmick departs after an awkward handshake, leaving Pip alone in the top-floor chambers of Mr. Pocket, Jun. After a long wait, a breathless young man arrives carrying strawberries and paper bags — and the two immediately recognize each other. Herbert Pocket is the "pale young gentleman" Pip fought at Satis House years earlier, and Pip is the "prowling boy" Herbert remembers. The chapter ends on this note of astonished mutual recognition.

Q: Who is Mr. Wemmick in Chapter 21 of Great Expectations?

Mr. Wemmick is the clerk to the lawyer Mr. Jaggers, and he serves as Pip's guide on his first morning in London. Dickens describes him as a dry, short man with a square wooden face that looks "imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel." He wears multiple mourning rings and memorial brooches, suggesting he has outlived — or professionally processed — many acquaintances. His mechanical post-office mouth gives a false impression of smiling, and his unsentimental view of London crime ("They'll do it, if there's anything to be got by it") reveals a pragmatic man shaped by years of working in the criminal-law world.

Q: What is Barnard's Inn in Great Expectations, and why is Pip disappointed by it?

Barnard's Inn is a set of lodging chambers in London where Pip is sent to live with Herbert Pocket. Pip had imagined it as a proper hotel comparable to the Blue Boar inn in his hometown, but he instead finds "the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner." The courtyard is surrounded by dismal trees, dismal sparrows, and crumbling rooms with cracked windows and "To Let" signs everywhere. Dickens personifies the Inn as a mourning figure covered in soot and ashes, "undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole." Pip's disappointment is thematically significant — it is his first concrete experience of the gap between expectation and reality that defines the novel's title.

Q: What themes are explored in Chapter 21 of Great Expectations?

The central theme of Chapter 21 is the gap between expectation and reality. Pip's "great expectations" led him to imagine a glamorous London life, but Barnard's Inn — rotting, dusty, and funereal — delivers the opposite. This disillusionment mirrors the novel's broader argument that social ambition often leads to hollow rewards. A second theme is social class as performance: Pip's confusion about whether handshaking is "the London fashion," Wemmick's mechanical smile, and the gap between the grand name "Barnard's Inn" and its squalid reality all suggest that gentility is largely a matter of appearances. Finally, the chapter continues the motif of interconnected fates, as the coincidence of Herbert Pocket being both Pip's new roommate and the boy from Satis House reinforces how tightly the novel's characters are bound together.

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CASTING my eyes on Mr Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose, but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off. I judged him to be a bachelor from the frayed condition of his linen, and he appeared to have sustained a good many bereavements; for, he wore at least four mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a lady and a weeping willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too, that several rings and seals hung at his watch chain, as if he were quite laden with remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering eyes -- small, keen, and black -- and thin wide mottled lips. He had had them, to the best of my belief, from forty to fifty years.

`So you were never in London before?' said Mr Wemmick to me.

`No,' said I.

`I was new here once,' said Mr Wemmick. `Rum to think of now!'

`You are well acquainted with it now?'

`Why, yes,' said Mr Wemmick. `I know the moves of it.'

`Is it a very wicked place?' I asked, more for the sake of saying something than for information.

`You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered, in London. But there are plenty of people anywhere, who'll do that for you.'

`If there is bad blood between you and them,' said I, to soften it off a little.

`Oh! I don't know about bad blood,' returned Mr Wemmick; `there's not much bad blood about. They'll do it, if there's any- thing to be got by it.'

`That makes it worse.'

`You think so?' returned Mr Wemmick. `Much about the same, l should say.'

He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before him: walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the streets to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post- office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the top of Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical appearance, and that he was not smiling at all.

`Do you know where Mr Matthew Pocket lives?' I asked Mr Wemmick.

`Yes,' said he, nodding in the direction. `At Hammersmith, west of London.'

`Is that far?'

`Well! Say five miles.'

`Do you know him?'

`Why, you're a regular cross-examiner!' said Mr Wemmick, looking at me with an approving air. `Yes, I know him. I know him! '

There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of these words, that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text, when he said here we were at Barnard's Inn. My depression was not alleviated by the announcement, for, I had sup- posed that establishment to be an hotel kept by Mr Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for Tom-cats.

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were dis- gorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were divided, were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let To Let To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frouzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard and it had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar -- rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides -- addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, `Try Barnard's Mixture.'

So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great expecta- tions, that I looked in dismay at Mr Wemmick. `Ah!' said he, mistaking me; `the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me.'

He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs -- which appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors and find themselves without the means of coming down -- to a set of chambers on the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN., was painted on the door, and there was a label on the letter-box, `Return shortly.'

`He hardly thought you'd come so soon,' Mr Wemmick ex- plained. `You don't want me any more?'

`No, thank you,' said I.

`As I keep the cash,' Mr Wemmick observed, `we shall most likely meet pretty often. Good day.'

`Good day.'

I put out my hand, and Mr Wemmick at first looked at it as if he thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said, correcting himself,

`To be sure! Yes. You're in the habit of shaking hands?'

I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion, but said yes.

`I have got so out of it!' said Mr Wemmick -- `except at last. Very glad, I'm sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!'

When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the stair- case window and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view of the Inn through the window's encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself that London was decidedly overrated.

Mr Pocket, Junior's, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written my name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there arose before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a member of society of about my own standing. He had a paper-bag under each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand, and was out of breath.

`Mr Pip?' said he.

`Mr Pocket?' said I.

`Dear me!' he exclaimed. `I am extremely sorry; but I knew there was a coach from your part of the country at midday, and I thought you would come by that one. The fact is, I have been out on your account -- not that that is any excuse -- for I thought, coming from the country, you might like a little fruit after dinner, and I went to Covent Garden Market to get it good.'

For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my head. I acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think this was a dream.

`Dear me!' said Mr Pocket, Junior. `This door sticks so!'

As he was fast making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door while the paper-bags were under his arms, I begged him to allow me to hold them. He relinquished them with an agreeable smile, and combated with the door as if it were a wild beast. It yielded so suddenly at last, that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered back upon the opposite door, and we both laughed. But still I felt as if my eyes must start out of my head, and as if this must be a dream.

`Pray come in,' said Mr Pocket, Junior. `Allow me to lead the way. I am rather bare here, but I hope you'll be able to make out tolerably well till Monday. My father thought you would get on more agreeably through to-morrow with me than with him, and might like to take a walk about London. I am sure I shall be very happy to show London to you. As to our table, you won't find that bad, I hope, for it will be supplied from our coffee-house here, and (it is only right I should add) at your expense, such being Mr Jaggers's directions. As to our lodging, it's not by any means splendid, because I have my own bread to earn, and my father hasn't anything to give me, and I shouldn't be willing to take it, if he had. This is our sitting-room -- just such chairs and tables and carpet and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You mustn't give me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors, because they come for you from the coffee-house. This is my little bedroom; rather musty, but Barnard's is musty. This is your bed- room; the furniture's hired for the occasion, but I trust it will answer the purpose; if you should want anything, I'll go and fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall be alone together, but we shan't fight, I dare say. But, dear me, I beg your pardon, you're holding the fruit all this time. Pray let me take these bags from you. I am quite ashamed.'

As I stood opposite to Mr Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags, One, Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that I knew to be in mine, and he said, falling back:

`Lord bless me, you're the prowling boy!'

`And you,' said I, `are the pale young gentleman!'

Frequently Asked Questions about CHAPTER 21 from Great Expectations

What happens in Chapter 21 of Great Expectations?

In Chapter 21, Pip walks through London with Mr. Wemmick, Jaggers's clerk, who escorts him to his new lodgings at Barnard's Inn. Pip is dismayed to find the Inn is not a respectable hotel but a decaying, squalid collection of shabby buildings around a gloomy courtyard. Wemmick departs after an awkward handshake, leaving Pip alone in the top-floor chambers of Mr. Pocket, Jun. After a long wait, a breathless young man arrives carrying strawberries and paper bags — and the two immediately recognize each other. Herbert Pocket is the "pale young gentleman" Pip fought at Satis House years earlier, and Pip is the "prowling boy" Herbert remembers. The chapter ends on this note of astonished mutual recognition.

Who is Mr. Wemmick in Chapter 21 of Great Expectations?

Mr. Wemmick is the clerk to the lawyer Mr. Jaggers, and he serves as Pip's guide on his first morning in London. Dickens describes him as a dry, short man with a square wooden face that looks "imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel." He wears multiple mourning rings and memorial brooches, suggesting he has outlived — or professionally processed — many acquaintances. His mechanical post-office mouth gives a false impression of smiling, and his unsentimental view of London crime ("They'll do it, if there's anything to be got by it") reveals a pragmatic man shaped by years of working in the criminal-law world.

What is Barnard's Inn in Great Expectations, and why is Pip disappointed by it?

Barnard's Inn is a set of lodging chambers in London where Pip is sent to live with Herbert Pocket. Pip had imagined it as a proper hotel comparable to the Blue Boar inn in his hometown, but he instead finds "the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner." The courtyard is surrounded by dismal trees, dismal sparrows, and crumbling rooms with cracked windows and "To Let" signs everywhere. Dickens personifies the Inn as a mourning figure covered in soot and ashes, "undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole." Pip's disappointment is thematically significant — it is his first concrete experience of the gap between expectation and reality that defines the novel's title.

How does Pip recognize Herbert Pocket at the end of Chapter 21?

When Herbert Pocket arrives at the chambers, Pip notices something familiar about his appearance and feels "as if my eyes would start out of my head." As they stand face to face while Pip hands over the paper bags, Herbert suddenly exclaims, "Lord bless me, you're the prowling boy!" and Pip replies, "And you are the pale young gentleman!" They are recognizing each other from their encounter at Satis House in Chapter 11, when young Pip visited Miss Havisham and fought an impromptu boxing match with a pale boy in the garden. This revelation creates both comic surprise and narrative cohesion, linking Pip's new London life back to the formative experiences at Miss Havisham's.

What themes are explored in Chapter 21 of Great Expectations?

The central theme of Chapter 21 is the gap between expectation and reality. Pip's "great expectations" led him to imagine a glamorous London life, but Barnard's Inn — rotting, dusty, and funereal — delivers the opposite. This disillusionment mirrors the novel's broader argument that social ambition often leads to hollow rewards. A second theme is social class as performance: Pip's confusion about whether handshaking is "the London fashion," Wemmick's mechanical smile, and the gap between the grand name "Barnard's Inn" and its squalid reality all suggest that gentility is largely a matter of appearances. Finally, the chapter continues the motif of interconnected fates, as the coincidence of Herbert Pocket being both Pip's new roommate and the boy from Satis House reinforces how tightly the novel's characters are bound together.

What literary devices does Dickens use in Chapter 21 of Great Expectations?

Dickens employs several distinctive literary devices in this chapter. His description of Wemmick's face as a block of wood worked over by a "dull-edged chisel" is an extended metaphor that reduces a human face to raw material and craftsmanship. The passage on Barnard's Inn is rich with personification — the Inn wears "a frouzy mourning of soot and smoke," has "strewn ashes on its head," and its rots "moaned, 'Try Barnard's Mixture.'" Dickens also uses dramatic irony in the recognition scene, since attentive readers may recall the pale young gentleman from Chapter 11 before Pip and Herbert do. Throughout, death imagery — mourning rings, weeping willows, tombs, the courtyard as a "flat burying-ground" — creates a darkly comic atmosphere that undercuts Pip's aspirations.