Chapter LV

Size: 48 cm x 32 cm

In attendance of Mr. Wemmick marrying Miss Skiffins, Pip and him help Mr. Wemmick's father into a pair of white kid gloves.

Pip is cast down. The convict Magwitch has been apprehended and was convicted at the trial for entering England under pain of death. His benefactor gone, he ponders what to do with his life.

On his way home, he meets Mr. Wemmick, Mr. Jaggers's clerk, at his door. The two discuss Magwitch's demise, and Mr. Wemmick laments all of Magwitch's, and in due time Pip's, property, which got seized by the Crown. On a change of whim, Mr. Wemmick announces he is taking a one-day holiday for the first time in twelve years and asks Pip to take a walk with him on Monday morning.

At eight in the morning, Pip finds Mr. Wemmick dressed tighter than usual at his Walworth Castle. The unusual man strikes him as even more unusual when he walks out with a fishing rod over his shoulder. Pip asks if they plan to go fishing, but Mr. Wemmick just tells him he likes to walk with one.

They end up walking to Camberwell Green, where Mr. Wemmick stops at a church and promptly decides to enter it with Pip.

Inside the church, Mr. Wemmick puts down his fishing rod and takes out a pair of white kid gloves, which he puts on promptly. Mr. Wemmick's father appears with Miss Skiffins at the entrance of the church, and Pip realizes he's been roped into Mr. Wemmick's and Miss Skiffins's wedding.

The drawing captures the moment in which Mr. Wemmick helps his father into his gloves by an unusual method:

"The old gentleman, however, experienced so much difficulty in getting his gloves on, that Wemmick found it necessary to put him with his back against a pillar, and then to get behind the pillar himself and pull away at them, while I for my part held the old gentleman round the waist, that he might present and equal and safe resistance. By dint of this ingenious Scheme, his gloves were got on to perfection."

A clerk and clergyman wed the couple, and Pip acts as a backer. In the end, Mr. Wemmick quips nobody would have guessed on their walk to the church he had gone to get married, shouldering his fishing rod!

I looked up which church could have been the place for the wedding, and Anglican St. Giles' Church, Camberwell, seemed to be right on the money.