Plot Summary
Chapter 21 marks Pip's first full morning in London as he walks with Mr. Wemmick, Jaggers's clerk, toward his new lodgings. Along the way, Pip observes Wemmick closely, noting his dry, wooden face that looks as though it were "imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel," his collection of mourning rings and memorial jewelry, and his post-office-like mouth that gives a perpetual mechanical appearance of smiling. Their brief conversation reveals Wemmick's unsentimental view of London: people will cheat, rob, and murder you not out of personal malice but simply "if there's anything to be got by it."
Wemmick leads Pip to Barnard's Inn, which Pip had imagined as a respectable hotel comparable to the Blue Boar back home. Instead, he discovers a wretched collection of shabby buildings surrounding a melancholy courtyard filled with dismal trees, dismal sparrows, and dismal cats. The rooms are in every state of decay — cracked glass, crippled flower-pots, dusty neglect — and the whole place reeks of dry rot, wet rot, and nearby coaching-stables. Wemmick deposits Pip at the top-floor chambers of Mr. Pocket, Jun. and departs with an awkward handshake, confessing he has "got so out of it" — except at funerals.
Left alone, Pip waits impatiently until a breathless young man arrives carrying paper bags and strawberries he purchased at Covent Garden Market for Pip's benefit. As the two young men stand face to face, mutual recognition strikes: Herbert Pocket is the "pale young gentleman" Pip once fought in the garden at Satis House, and Pip is the "prowling boy" Herbert remembers — a coincidence that closes the chapter on a note of astonished humor.
Character Development
This chapter introduces two important characters in depth. Mr. Wemmick emerges as a curious, self-contained figure whose mechanical demeanor and transactional worldview contrast sharply with Pip's youthful idealism. His mourning jewelry and reluctance to shake hands hint at a man who has learned to keep emotional distance in a city that runs on self-interest. Herbert Pocket, meanwhile, arrives as Wemmick's opposite — warm, apologetic, generous, and slightly bumbling. His thoughtful purchase of fruit for a stranger from the country immediately establishes him as a figure of genuine kindness, and his modest honesty about his circumstances ("I have my own bread to earn") signals an integrity that will make him Pip's closest friend.
Themes and Motifs
The dominant theme is the gap between expectation and reality. Pip's "great expectations" conjured visions of a glamorous London life, but Barnard's Inn — with its rotting stairs, funereal dust, and "To Let" signs glaring from empty rooms — delivers the opposite. Dickens personifies the Inn itself as a grieving, penitent creature "undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole," transforming a simple lodging into a symbol of deflated ambition. The theme of social class as performance also surfaces: Wemmick's mechanical smile, Pip's confusion about whether handshaking is "the London fashion," and the gap between the name "Barnard's Inn" and its squalid reality all suggest that gentility is largely illusion.
Literary Devices
Dickens employs extended metaphor in his description of Wemmick, whose face is rendered as a block of wood worked over by a dull chisel — an image that reduces a human face to raw material and craftsmanship. The passage describing Barnard's Inn is a tour de force of personification and dark humor: the Inn wears "a frouzy mourning of soot and smoke," has "strewn ashes on its head," and its dry rot and wet rot "moaned, 'Try Barnard's Mixture.'" Dickens also uses dramatic irony in the chapter's climax — the reader may recall the pale young gentleman from Chapter 11 before the characters themselves make the connection, heightening the pleasure of the recognition scene. The repeated motif of death imagery (mourning rings, weeping willows, tombs, the courtyard as a "flat burying-ground") creates a darkly comic atmosphere that undercuts Pip's aspirations at every turn.