Mr. Pip

Matilda was quickly swept away by Great Expectations, feeling she had “been spoken to by this boy Pip” after just the first chapter. She notes that nobody had told her or her fellow students about the possibilities literature presented, allowing them to meet new people and live foreign lives. She found herself completely immersed in Mr. Watts’s readings, especially when he varied his voice to portray new characters, as he did when Magwitch—an escaped convict in Great Expectations—seizes Pip and threatens to rip his heart out if he doesn’t bring him food and a file to break out of his shackles. In that moment, Magwitch was right there in the classroom; “Mr. Watts had given us kids another piece of the world,” Matilda writes. “I found I could go back to it as often as I liked.”

As Mr. Watts’s reading of Great Expectations progressed, Matilda got to know Pip more and more and realized she had certain things in common with him despite their different circumstances. Just as Pip never knew his parents, Matilda felt she hardly knew her father. She found herself unable to remember what he looked like and trying—like Pip tries to do with his own parents—to fill in an image of the man. Because Pip guesses that his father was a “square, stout, dark man with curly black hair,” Matilda asked Dolores if her own father was stout, surprising her mother with her strange new vocabulary; “Stout!” her mother replied. “Where did you get that word from, girl?” She then told her mother about Great Expectations, narrating the story to satisfy Dolores’s curiosity.

“This was the first time I had been in a position to tell her anything about the world,” Matilda notes in regards to her narration of Great Expectations to Dolores. When her mother learned that Pip is an orphan, she lamented, “He is lost.” Sensing Dolores’s interest in the story, Matilda tried her best to “color in that world for her,” though for the most part she had to use her own words because she couldn’t remember the book’s exact lines. Still, she told her mother about Pip’s experience in the graveyard and how Magwitch, the escaped convict, forces him to steal from his older sister and uncle, who watch over him. “What would you do, girl?” Dolores asked. “If a man was hiding in the jungle and he ask you to steal from me. Would you do that?” Matilda reassured her mother that she wouldn’t betray her. At the end of this first installment, Dolores told her that she wanted to know everything that happens in Great Expectations.

When the class wasn’t focusing on Great Expectations, it became clear that there were large gaps in Mr. Watts’s knowledge. Still, he told them about England, explaining that it is comprised of multiple different parts. This was a difficult concept for Matilda and her classmates to grasp, especially because most of them had never left the island of Bougainville. One of the students asked Mr. Watts if there were black people in England, a question to which he tersely responded, “Yes,” before shifting his attention away from the matter. To make up for his lacking wisdom, he began inviting the children’s mothers to come into the class to “share what they knew of the world.”