The kids are reading Great Expectations, and this week we’ll be working on how Dickens creates such masterfully drawn and memorable characters.

Two of the characters we’re looking at are Joe Gargery, Pip’s step-father, and his wife whom Pip never calls anything other than “Mrs. Joe.” We first meet her in chapter one, but it’s in the next chapter that we get some background information:

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,—a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day of her life.

We get a lot of information in that passage, but since it’s through Pip’s eyes, he fails to see the nuance. Pip says that “she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand” but he also admits that Joe is “a sort of Hercules in strength.” The question then arises: why does Joe allow Mrs. Joe to be abusive both to him and Pip? If we look at what she faced, a few things come into focus: at twenty, she was forced to raise her little brother as her parents joined five of her siblings in the church graveyard. Joe married her because otherwise, a single woman with her infant brother to raise, she would have had most likely to turn to prostitution to support them. Perhaps this has something to do with it.