Who is mr wemmick in great expectations

For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Wemmick is Jaggers' clerk—sometimes. When he's the clerk, he's gruff, business-like, and "dry" But when he's at home in Walworth, he's entirely different.

He's built himself a little castle—or, rather, added some "sham" gothic windows and a teeny tiny drawbridge—where his "hard face" softens and he spends his time puttering around and fixing up his house and yard" The difference between Business Wemmick and Home Wemmick is so great that Pip almost thinks there are "twin Wemmicks" And especially his ability to create memorable characters out of relatively minor players in his great dramas: characters like John Wemmick, the clerk to Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations.

Wemmick is a man divided. Divided between work and Walworth, where he lives out an idyllic denial of all that is dehumanising about his workaday existence. Rather the problem is that the world has been turned on its head: Wemmick leaves his work behind when he goes home for the most part but he also leaves home, and homely values, behind when he goes to work.

He may not suffer from the same dehumanisation that afflicts Jaggers and Miss Havisham but he lives only a half life at work. Wemmick at first [to look] at it as if he thought I wanted something.

Jaggers is a hard-working, self-made man, who is direct, true to fact, and a good man in his own way. Seeing the horrors of prison, and the abuse of children by the legal system, he takes in Molly and finds a home for Estella. But he seeks his security in control and power, and chooses to wash off both emotions and people instead of embracing them. He pays a cost in his life, knows it, and accepts it.

Wemmick is the transition character: a little of Joe and of Jaggers. He is true to fact in the office, and true to emotion at home.