A blacksmith's boy meets an escaped convict on the marshes, is summoned to a mansion where the clocks stopped at a jilted wedding and a girl is being raised to break hearts, and then — out of nowhere — comes into a fortune from a benefactor he is forbidden to name. Pip trades the forge for London and the polish of a gentleman, and spends the rest of the book learning where the money came from, what it cost, and how much of himself he threw away chasing it. Dickens's most tightly wound novel, and his most honest: a self-made man's story told by a narrator ashamed of the boy he used to be.