Get hold of portable property

Get hold of portable property is Wemmick’s stated guiding principle, a practical maxim that turns small, movable objects into possessions worth acquiring and keeping. Its appearances link his curiosity about property to the novel’s broader contrasts between material belongings, social standing, and personal attachment.

Wemmick’s Guiding Principle

Wemmick explains that his jewellery consists of gifts, each one leading to another. He accepts them as curiosities, but also as property: though they may not be worth much, they are portable. He calls this outlook his guiding star, making the phrase both a rule of acquisition and a concise expression of his attention to objects that can be possessed and carried away.

The principle is not presented as a grand theory of wealth. Its force lies in Wemmick’s matter-of-fact treatment of modest or unusual things as property, and in the cheerful practicality with which he invites Pip to visit his collection. His interest in possessions extends to curiosities and to the garden and summer-house he offers to show his guest, giving the maxim a domestic as well as acquisitive setting.

Objects in Wemmick’s World

At a prison visit, Wemmick asks a condemned coiner for a pair of tumblers, or tumbler pigeons, and promises that they will be cared for. Once they have left, he tells Pip that the prisoner is a skilled coiner and is expected to be executed on Monday. Even in that setting, Wemmick notes that the pigeons count as portable property. The exchange joins his collecting habit to the grim institutional world in which he works: the condemned man’s birds are at once a personal request and an addition to Wemmick’s inventory of useful curiosities.

Wemmick’s attention to portable possessions also throws other scenes of ownership into relief. When Pip’s great expectations are revealed, Mr. Jaggers counts out twenty guineas from a long purse and pushes the money across the table. Later, when Pip’s benefactor points to Pip’s watch, ring, fine linen, clothes, and books as signs of gentlemanly status, possessions become evidence of the transformation the benefactor believes he has purchased. The maxim does not itself explain these scenes, but it helps illuminate how objects can carry meanings well beyond their material value.

The Motif Beyond Wemmick

The novel repeatedly makes ordinary objects consequential. At home, Mrs. Joe cuts bread and butter with a practised routine, dividing the thick slice between Joe and Pip. On one evening Pip, afraid he will have nothing to give the escaped convict and his companion, leaves his own portion uneaten and resolves to hide it in his trousers. Here a simple piece of food becomes a reserve shaped by fear and obligation, rather than an item gathered for its portability or value.

Joe’s file acquires a different significance when a strange visitor stirs and tastes his rum-and-water with it, taking care that only Pip sees the tool. Pip recognizes it as Joe’s file and understands that the visitor knows his convict. The file is an ordinary work implement, but its presence silently connects the visitor to the earlier encounter and changes Pip’s understanding of the scene. Read alongside Wemmick’s maxim, these objects show how portable things can be kept, exchanged, displayed, or recognized—and how their significance depends on the relationships and circumstances they carry with them.