Why do the marshes matter?

The marshes are where Pip’s moral life begins — fear, pity, theft, and a bond with Magwitch that London money cannot erase. They are also a landscape of illegibility: convicts, fog, and the river’s edge, where Compeyson’s respectability and Magwitch’s criminal mark are sorted by appearance rather than by desert.

Every return to the marsh revises Pip’s London story. The benefactor revelation brings the marsh into Pip’s rooms; Magwitch’s failed escape returns to the river. The setting is not local color. It is the novel’s reminder that Pip’s “expectations” were always entangled with crime, gratitude, and the people gentility prefers not to see.