Pip has received a note from Miss Havisham, asking him to
visit her regarding a matter about which he has requested to speak to her; namely, Pip
needs money from her in order to procure a position at Clarikker's for Herbert Pocket.
In Chapter XLIX of Great Expectations, Pip visits and finds Miss
Havisham terribly alone. She tells him to let her know what sum he needs and he replies
"Nine hundred pounds." She then writes a note to Mr. Jaggers regarding the release of
funds for Pip, adding that there is a second page and he only needs to sign
it.
“My name
is on the first leaf. If you can ever write under my name, ‘I forgive her,’ though ever
so long after my broken heart is dust—pray do
it!”
Pip is confused about
her grief, but realizes that she relaizes her life is not natural. He
remarks,
I
knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in
taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned
affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full
well.
This is what Pip terms
vanity of sorrow
which had become a master mania, like the vanity
of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous
vanities that have been curses in this
world.
Pip alludes to the
tendency of people to magnify the injustices which have been perpetrated against them
and, then, to take an almost perverse pride in their wallowing in sorrow. Or, in the
vanity of remorse--grieving for someone or something long past the time which a person
has died.
The vanity of unworthiness is an excess humility,
one beyond normal control. For instance, a person belittles him or herself long after
the accident or reasons are in the current mind. It is a perverse pride that one takes
in this wallowing in an emotion, in wearing this remorse, or unworthiness, or penitence,
or any of the others past the point of normal length that Pip calls a
vanity.
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