Joe Gargery might be the most universally liked character in Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations. Born into a family with an abusive father, who cared more for the bottle than he did his own family, Joe was taught in the ways of blacksmithing. A formal education, with the ability to read and write, was never afforded to this man of large physical stature, where muscle and brawn were much more important tools than learning.

     Where Joe Gargery lacked a gentlemen’s education, he more than made up for it with his kind and gentle ways. Early on in Dicken’s tale we hear of Joe’s caring ways when he marries a woman who has also taken on the parental duties for her younger brother, Pip. Joe treats his wife and young guardian as well as anyone could have hoped for. He many times shielded young Pip from the abuse of Mrs. Joe and took that same abuse upon himself without complaint. Joe looked forward to the day that he could pass on his blacksmithing skills to his young Pip, as a father would his only son. But, when Pip longed for something more out of life than to follow in the blacksmith’s footsteps, Joe did nothing that would have held Pip back from his great expectations. Even after Pip became ashamed of Joe, with his lack of education and his lower social class, Joe never turned his back on the boy he had taken in as his own.