“Look'ee
here, Pip,” said he....I forgot myself half a minute ago. What I said was low; that's
what it was; low. Look'ee here, Pip. Look over it. I ain't a going to be
low.”
Abel Magwitch
apologizes to Pip for having boasted that Pip will possess all the things that the
owners in Australia have had, as well as those people who scorned him all his life from
the judges "in their wigs," to the arrogant colonists. Magwitch wishes for Pip to have
wealth and be able to purchase whatever he likes for two reasons. One reason is
repayment for the young man's kindness so long ago. Another reason is that through Pip,
Abel Magwitch can be redeemed from merely being a vagabond. By living vicariously
through Pip, Abel Magwitch can feel that his pitiable life has not been so unworthy,
after all.
Magwitch displays once again a sense of
propriety that he exhibited so many years ago when he apologized to Joe for having eaten
the family's meat pie. Ironically, in some ways, Magwitch is himself a gentle man.
This is another of Dickens's methods of pointing to the frivolity of Pip's desire to be
a gentleman when someone as lowly as Magwitch knows how to behave in a more gentlemanly
fashion than Pip who neglects Joe and Biddy and, when he does see them, scolds
Biddy.
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