Dolge Orlick is the day-laborer in Joe’s forge. He is a slouching embodiment of evil, malicious and shrewd, hurting people simply because he enjoys it. He is responsible for the attack on Pip’s sister and will later almost succeed in his attempt to murder Pip. Mrs.
Joe Pip’s sister and Joe’s wife, known only as Mrs. Joe” throughout the novel, is a stern and overbearing figure to both Pip and Joe. She keeps a spotless household and frequently menaces her husband and her brother with her cane, which she calls “Tickler.”
She also forces them to drink a foul-tasting concoction called tar-water. Mrs. Joe is petty and ambitious. Her fondest wish is to be something more than the wife of Uncle Pumblechook, Pip’s pompous and arrogant uncle. He is actually Joe’s uncle and therefore Pip’s uncle-in-law,” but Pip and his sister both call him “Uncle Pumblechook.”
A merchant obsessed with money, Pumblechook is responsible for arranging Pip’s first meeting with Miss Havisham. Throughout the rest of the novel, he shamelessly takes credit for Pip’s rise, even though Compeyson, a criminal and former partner of Magwitch, is responsible for Magwitch’s capture at the end of the novel. Pip, a young orphan living with his sister and her husband in the marshes of Kent, sits in a cemetery one evening looking at his parents’ tombstones. Suddenly, an escaped convict springs up from behind a tombstone, grabs Pip, and orders him to bring him food and a file for his leg irons.”
Pip obeys and the fearsome convict is soon captured. The convict protects Pip by claiming him as his own. One day, Pip is taken to play at Satis House, the home of the wealthy dowager Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham was left at the altar on her wedding day and now wears an old wedding dress everywhere she goes. During his visit, he meets a beautiful young girl named Estella. Estella treats him coldly and contemptuously, but he falls in love with her and dreams of becoming a wealthy gentleman so that he might be worthy of her. Pip is apprenticed to his brother-in-law Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith. One day, a lawyer named Jaggers appears with strange news: a secret.
