What happens in Chapter 20 of Great Expectations?
Chapter 20 of Great Expectations focuses on the intense moments surrounding Miss Havisham's fire and the news of Estella's marriage, marking a harsh end to Pip's long-held fantasies. When Pip visits Satis House, he finds Miss Havisham still sitting in her decaying wedding dress next to the rotting wedding cake, but the mood has shifted to something more desperate. As Pip questions her about Estella, Miss Havisham reveals, with growing anguish, that she raised Estella as a tool for revenge against men — and now she is a victim of that plan, unable to connect with the woman she created. The chapter reaches its climax with the fire: Miss Havisham's dress ignites from the hearth, and Pip rushes to extinguish the flames with his coat, burning his hands in the process. He saves her, but the harm — both physical and emotional — is permanent. Meanwhile, Estella's marriage to the brutish Bentley Drummle hits Pip with a quiet devastation, confirming that his romantic dreams were always a story he had written for himself. This chapter strips away every last layer of Pip's self-deception: the myth of the benefactress is shattered, his beloved is married, and even the house has tried to consume its mistress.
Analysis
Dickens orchestrates this chapter as a controlled collapse of the novel's central symbols. Throughout the story, Satis House has stood as a monument to frozen time—clocks stopped, cake rotting, light kept out—and the fire serves as the inevitable conclusion to that stillness: preservation turning into destruction. The irony is sharp and unforgiving. Miss Havisham, who has turned fire into a metaphor (she tells Pip she has a "sick fancy" that she will one day be laid on the wedding table and burned), is ultimately consumed by real flames, her wedding dress—the embodiment of her obsession—becoming the fuel.
Here, Dickens skillfully shifts his writing style. The gothic drama of the burning scene is conveyed through short, punchy sentences that reflect Pip's frantic actions, while the emotional reckoning—Miss Havisham's confession and her repeated "What have I done?"—is expressed in longer, more fragmented sentences that reveal a mind finally unraveling. The physical injuries Pip endures are the clearest example in the novel of his tendency to take on suffering for others, a theme that stretches from his early beatings at the forge to his unwavering loyalty to Magwitch.
Estella's marriage to Drummle represents a quieter yet equally devastating structural choice. Dickens denies Pip the dignity of a dramatic confrontation; instead, the news comes almost as an aside, which is exactly the point—Estella was never Pip's to claim. The chapter wraps up Miss Havisham's guilt and initiates the novel's final moral reckoning.
Key quotes from Chapter 20
“I had a sick fancy that I should be laid there, and that the wedding-cake should be brought in, and they should all be there, and it should be done.”
Miss Havisham articulates her own morbid fantasy of immolation at the wedding table, a premonition Dickens will literalise with savage irony moments later.
“What have I done! What have I done!”
Miss Havisham's broken repetition after the fire — addressed to Pip and to herself — is the novel's starkest expression of her belated recognition of the damage her revenge has wrought.
“I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her, and soaring at least as high as her head.”
Pip's visceral, almost hallucinatory account of the moment Miss Havisham's dress ignites captures the chapter's collapse of symbol into catastrophic event.