Summary Chapter 47




Mr. Peggotty and David follow Martha Endell through the streets of London, including Westminster Abbey and Millbank, when they arrive at a mud-bank, near a prison, where all manner of refuse, including furnaces, anchors, and windmill-sails, to name a few, can be found rusting and rotting.

Cautiously, David addresses Martha who seems to be talking to herself. Alas, at the mention of her name, Martha faints at which point David and Mr. Peggotty remove her to a platform of dry stones. There, when Martha regains her senses, she soliloquizes about the river, of how her life is synonymous to the river in that it passes through all the horrors of life before emptying into the vast, indifferent sea.

Eventually, David and Mr. Peggotty speak to Martha, relating all that has happened to Emily and wondering whether she might have an idea of Emily’s whereabouts. Consequently, Martha speaks of the gratitude she owes Emily who was the only one who had been kind to her when everyone else at Yarmouth had uniformly shunned her, compelling Mr. Peggotty, who was one of the shunners, to admit his guilt and to beg for forgiveness.

Reiterating the gratitude she owes Emily, Martha vows to do all that she can to find Emily and to get in touch with David and Mr. Peggotty should something turn up.

It is about midnight when David returns home that he finds the light still on in his aunt’s cottage. David also notices that a man is loitering outside his aunt’s house while eating and drinking. Presently, David’s aunt steps out of the house and hands the man some money which the man refuses on account of its paltriness. Subsequently, David’s aunt, reminding the man of her recent misfortune, tells the man to take it or leave it.

Later, when David gets a chance to question his aunt, she tells David that the man is her former husband; that she had loved him once but that he had wronged her; that he had turned to a life of gambling and dissipation; and that now David knows, he should never speak of it again.



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