Great Expectations Has Two Real Endings — Here’s What Changes
The version you have read was written second, after a friend read the proofs and asked for something kinder.
Full spoilers for both endings of Great Expectations follow, including whether Pip and Estella finish the book together in each version.
Both are genuinely Dickens, written months apart, and the reason you have only read one of them is a single conversation with a friend who had seen the proofs. The version that reaches you in print, and the one behind the playable Great Expectations, is the second attempt. Here are both, in the words each was written in, and what actually changes between them.
🌫️ The ending in every copy you can buy
Chapter LIX. Pip comes back to the marshes after eleven years abroad, finds Joe and Biddy married with a son named after him, and walks up to the site of Satis House in the evening. The buildings are gone and the garden wall is still there, and Estella is standing in it. She tells him the ground is the only possession she has not given up, and they talk as two people who have been worked on by the same decades.
“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists 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 no shadow of another parting from her.”
Read it closely and it promises less than its reputation suggests. Four lines earlier Estella has said they will “continue friends apart” (l.20393), and the closing sentence reports only what Pip fails to see in the light, which is a careful piece of writing from a novelist who could have written a wedding if he had wanted one.
🐎 The ending Dickens wrote first
This one is not in the novel and never has been. It survives because John Forster, who had read the proofs and thought the original was the better book, printed the discarded pages in full as a footnote to his Life of Charles Dickens. In it Pip hears second-hand that Estella has been miserably married to Drummle, who used her with great cruelty, and that Drummle has since died “from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse”. She has married again, to a Shropshire doctor who once intervened when he saw how Drummle treated her, and the couple live on her own money.
“I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!”
The meeting is an accident. Pip is walking along Piccadilly with Joe and Biddy’s small son when a servant comes after him with a message from a lady in a pony carriage, and the lady turns out to be Estella, who assumes the child is his. They shake hands, she says that suffering has taught her what his heart used to be, and the carriage drives on. There is no garden, no mist, and nothing left ambiguous about whether these two people spend the rest of their lives together.
The Mists of Satis House is a doorway in the playable Great Expectations: you meet Estella in the ruined garden with the illusions gone, and you can take her hand, keep the distance she offers, or ask her the question Pip never quite asks. Role-play Great Expectations →
✉️ Why he changed it
Forster is precise about the mechanism and short about it. Edward Bulwer Lytton, a novelist Dickens published in his own weekly and trusted on craft, read the proofs and objected to a close that would leave Pip a solitary man, and Dickens rewrote the last chapter rather than argue. Dickens’s own account, quoted by Forster from a letter, is almost cheerful about the surgery.
“Bulwer, who has been, as I think you know, extraordinarily taken by the book, so strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and supported his view with such good reasons, that I resolved to make the change. I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.”
Forster agreed that the change made the book more acceptable and thought it made the book worse, and he says so in the sentence that introduces the footnote: the first ending, he writes, “seems to be more consistent with the drift, as well as natural working out, of the tale” (l.35688-35690). The biographer printed the pages precisely because he wanted the record to contain the version he preferred.
📐 What actually changes between them
The plot facts barely move. Estella is still ruined by Miss Havisham’s training, still married badly, still changed by it; Pip is still older, poorer and clearer-eyed. What changes is what the book is willing to let the reader assume.
- Where they meet. Original: a chance encounter in traffic on Piccadilly, with a servant sent across the road. Published: the garden of the demolished house, on the one piece of ground Estella kept.
- Who else is there.Original: Joe and Biddy’s child, mistaken by Estella for Pip’s own son. Published: nobody, in an empty ruin at dusk.
- What the last gesture is. Original: a handshake through a carriage window, then the carriage moves off. Published: Pip takes her hand and the two of them walk out of the place together.
- What the reader is left holding. Original: a settled fact, two separate lives that touched once more in passing. Published: an absence of evidence, phrased as the absence of a shadow.
One small textual oddity is worth knowing if you go looking. Forster records two wording changes made with the new ending, and only one of them is visible in the standard text: the answer to Biddy’s question about whether Pip still frets for Estella does read “O no,—I think not, Biddy” (l.20260), exactly as the footnote says, while the opening of the final chapter still reads “For eleven years” (l.20221) rather than the eight years Forster records. A revised novel is a thing with layers in it, not a clean replacement of one file by another.
Which one is true is a question with a boring answer and an interesting one. The boring answer is that the printed ending is the ending, because Dickens authorised it, revised it again for the 1867 edition, and let it stand for the rest of his life. The interesting answer is that the book he actually finished first is the one his closest friend thought fitted the story, and it is sitting in a footnote where anyone can read it.
Sources
- Great Expectations (Project Gutenberg eBook #1400, 1867 text) — Project Gutenberg
- The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I–III (Project Gutenberg eBook #25851) — Project Gutenberg
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton — Wikipedia
- Great Expectations — Wikipedia
- All the Year Round — Wikipedia
Frequently asked questions
- Why did Charles Dickens change the ending of Great Expectations?
- Because his friend Edward Bulwer Lytton read the proofs and objected to a close that left Pip alone, and Dickens rewrote the last chapter rather than argue the point. The two were professional colleagues as well as friends: Great Expectations was running weekly in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round at the time, and Bulwer Lytton's own novel A Strange Story was serialised in the same magazine, with Dickens as its editor.
- What was the original ending of Great Expectations?
- A brief chance meeting in London years later, with Estella remarried to a Shropshire doctor, ending in a handshake rather than a reunion. It has never been printed inside the novel. It survives because John Forster set the discarded pages out in full as footnote 270 of his Life of Charles Dickens, which is why every modern edition that carries it reprints it as an appendix rather than as a chapter.
- What is the hardest Dickens book to read?
- Not this one, on any measure you can check. Great Expectations is told from start to finish by a single first-person narrator, its 59 chapters are short because it ran in weekly instalments rather than in the long monthly numbers Dickens usually wrote in, and the cast is small enough to hold in your head without a chart. The novels readers name instead are the long third-person ones with a dozen plot lines running at once.
- Which text of Great Expectations do modern editions print?
- Almost always the 1867 Charles Dickens Edition, the last version the author revised himself, which is the text Project Gutenberg's eBook #1400 carries and the one quoted throughout this page. It keeps the revised ending. The original ending appears in modern paperbacks only as an appendix, printed from Forster's transcription rather than from any manuscript Dickens released.
- Does Estella ever admit she cannot love Pip?
- She says it flatly and early. "You must know," she tells him in Chapter XXIX, "that I have no heart,—if that has anything to do with my memory," and she repeats the warning in different words whenever he presses her. Whichever ending you read, nothing in the last chapter contradicts what she said about herself two hundred pages earlier.
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