Great Expectations Chapter Eight Summary

Pip spends the night at Mr. Pumblechook’s in the attic, where the ceiling is like two inches from his eyebrows. Mr. Pumblechook is a seedsman, meaning he sells lots of seedy stuff. He also wears corduroys. A lot of corduroy goes on in the seed store.
In the morning, Mr. Pumblechook pours Pip milk with water in it and bread with only a teensy amount of butter. This bites the big one, Pip thinks.
To top it off, Mr. Pumblechook quizzes Pip on his multiplication tables while munching on an Egg McMuffin (with bacon).
Mr. Pumblechook and Pip walk over to Miss Havisham’s. It’s a big, dismal mansion with lots of bars, gates, and boarded up windows. There’s a vacant brewery too. They ring the bell and wait for someone to unlock the gate.
That someone arrives and is kind of cold and snippy. She’s a young girl, and she doesn’t let Mr. Pumblechook inside. She tells Pip that the house has too names: the manor house and Satis House. "Satis" means "enough" in either Greek, Hebrew, or Latin—we’re not quite sure (neither is she). Enough House. The little girl tells Pip that, when it was first built, the builders thought that whoever owned the house could want nothing more in life.
The little girl is Pip’s age, but she’s really proud and patronizing. She calls Pip, "boy." She is also really pretty.
The two go into the chained up house, and everything is completely dark. Without the little girl’s candle, Pip wouldn’t be able to see a thing. She leads him down a series of cold, dark passages.
The little girl drops Pip off at a closed door and tells him to go inside. When Pip does, he sees a dressing table and the whole room, though dimly lit, looks like a lady’s dressing room. He goes inside and finds the weirdest lady he’s ever seen in his life. She is old and she is wearing beautiful clothes. However, upon further inspection, Pip realizes that she is wearing a wedding dress and that the wedding dress is so old that it is yellowy-brown. She only has one shoe on, and she is wearing a tattered veil in her hair. There are jewels and gloves and lace on her dressing table, and there are half-packed trunks of dresses strewn about her.
She looks kind of like a cross between a skeleton and a mummy. She has deep sunken eyes, and her hair is all white.
Pip realizes that all of the clocks in the room are stopped at exactly twenty minutes to nine.
Miss Havisham tells Pip that she has a broken heart and then smiles weirdly. She tells Pip she wants to see him play, and then she commands him to play. How does one play on command? That violates the laws of playing. It’s like anti-play. Pip feels the same way, and he’s frozen in his tracks.
Miss Havisham asks Pip to call for Estella (which we guess is the little girl’s name), and he does, but he feels really weird about it. How would you feel if you were forced to yell a name like "Estella" into a dark, cold, empty mansion with a creepy, half-dead lady watching you?
Miss Havisham makes Pip and Estella play cards, and Estella doesn’t want to because Pip is "common." They play the age-old classic, Beggar My Neighbor, and Estella kicks Pip’s butt. But not without making fun of him for calling "knaves," "jacks." She scorns his course hands and his thick boots too. Pip doesn’t know what to do with himself. He has never doubted his hands, boots, or jacks before. What is going on? Aren't mid-life crises supposed to happen in the middle of life?
Miss Havisham asks Pip what he thinks of Estella, and he tells her that he thinks she’s proud, insulting, and pretty. Quite the cocktail of qualities. He also tells Miss H. that he wants to go home, and he wants to go home NOW. Wise move, little man.
Miss Havisham tells Pip to come back in six days, and she orders Estella to give him some food.
They walk down the pitch-black passages again, and Pip is weirded out by the sunshine outside. He thought for sure it would be dark out there too.
Estella brings him beer, bread, and meat and leaves it on the porch for him as though she were feeding a dog. Pip starts to cry, which totally pleases Estella, and then she leaves him outside. Pip has to kick a wall a little bit and twist his hair in order to get his tears and emotions out. He has never felt so degraded in all his days, and he wishes his boots were not so thick or his hands so course. But then he drinks some beer and eats some meat, and he feels better.
He starts to look around the "garden" and it’s in need of an Extreme Makeover. Everything is dead and withered.
He explores the brewery, too. The weird thing is that everywhere he goes, Estella is there too, but just ahead of him. It’s like she’s following him, but leading him at the same time. She climbs a ladder/stair in the brewery, and it looks like she’s climbing into the sky.
Then, suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Pip sees something hanging from a rafter at the other end of the brewery. He looks closer, and the thing is a figure of a woman all in white, and the face is of Miss Havisham. Logically, he runs toward the hanging figure (Shmoop interlude: Do not try this at home. Shmoop endorses the "if you see a white humanlike figure hanging from a rafter, turn and run" policy), but he finds there is nothing there at all. He is thoroughly rattled.
Estella leads him to the gate when he is ready to go, she makes fun of him for crying (because she was apparently spying on him), and then she pushes him out onto the street and locks the door behind him. Charming.
Pip goes straight to Mr. Pumblechook’s, but Mr. Pumblechook is nowhere in sight. Sweeet.
Pip walks home think about his coarse hands and his thick boots.

Next Page: Chapter Nine

Previous Page: Chapter Seven