What happens in Chapter XLV of Great Expectations?
After reading Wemmick's warning at the Temple gate, Pip hops into a hackney chariot heading to the Hummums in Covent Garden. There, he endures a miserable, sleepless night, plagued by the thought of "DON'T GO HOME." The rushlight in his room creates eerie shadows on the walls, and his mind races with worries about Provis's safety, the threat at his chambers, and his last moment with Estella. Eventually, exhausted, he drifts off to sleep and dreams of conjugating "Don't go home" as a verb in every possible mood and tense.
At seven, he gets up and makes his way to Wemmick's Castle in Walworth, arriving by eight. Over breakfast—during which he toasts a sausage for the Aged Parent—Wemmick carefully hints that he overheard Pip's chambers in Garden Court had been under surveillance and that Compeyson is alive and in London. Wemmick recounts what he did: he found Herbert at Clarriker's and advised him to relocate their unnamed guest ("Tom, Jack, or Richard") from the chambers. Herbert came up with a plan to house the man at a riverside place between Limehouse and Greenwich, run by a respectable widow, close to the bow-window home of his bedridden future father-in-law. By nine o'clock the night before, they had successfully moved him, using the cover story that the man had been called to Dover. Wemmick gives Pip the address and insists he visit that evening to check that everything is alright, then urgently advises him to secure the man's belongings. Pip spends the rest of the day quietly at the Castle, dozing by the fire with the Aged, enjoying loin of pork, and leaving at nightfall as Miss Skiffins is expected.
Analysis
The chapter splits into two contrasting halves: a night filled with gothic, solitary dread at the Hummums, and a morning of warm, domestic practicality at Wemmick's Castle. Dickens uses this contrast to illustrate how the same crisis can feel entirely different depending on the human environment surrounding it.
The Hummums sequence features rich, comic-grotesque personification: the four-poster bed straddles the room with "arbitrary legs," the rushlight appears as "the ghost of a walking-cane," and the perforated tin tower creates an "Argus" of staring eyes on the walls—eyes that seem to warn, "DON'T GO HOME." This visual motif of staring eyes unifies the night scene and externalizes Pip's anxiety. One of the chapter's most inventive passages transforms the warning into a grammatical exercise—Pip conjugates "Don't go home" through imperative and potential moods—a darkly comic device that reflects his obsessive, exhausted thinking.
At Walworth, the tone shifts to warmth and dry humor. Wemmick's elaborate circumlocutions ("a certain person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits," "Tom, Jack, or Richard") serve both as comic evasion and as a serious reminder of the risks associated with documentary evidence. His three numbered reasons for the riverside lodging parody the style of a legal brief, portraying him as someone who applies a professional method to personal loyalty. The Aged Parent's breakfast ritual—the white cloth, rakish nightcap, and cheerful "All right, John"—provides domestic comedy that alleviates the chapter's tension. It concludes with Pip drowsing peacefully by the fire, the teacups hinting at Miss Skiffins's arrival, creating a moment of quiet that sharply contrasts with the preceding night's misery.
Key quotes from Chapter XLV
“At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired a new expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw written, DON’T GO HOME.”
Pip lies awake in his room at the Hummums, watching the rushlight's pattern on the walls, as his anxiety about the warning takes visual form.
“Imperative mood, present tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let not them go home.”
Half-asleep from exhaustion, Pip's obsessive mind turns the warning into a grammatical conjugation exercise.
“Don’t break cover too soon. Lie close. Wait till things slacken, before you try the open, even for foreign air.”
Wemmick advises Pip on the safest strategy for their unnamed guest, using hunting metaphor to counsel patience.
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