Introduction

     In the summer of 2001, I journeyed to the United Kingdom for a three-week holiday. Due to budget miscalculations, I did not have sufficient funds for lodging and consequently, spent the nights sleeping in a very small car. I didn’t want to attract attention by settling in for the evening while the streets were still busy, so I would spend that time wandering about, exploring each town and village, until night had fallen and then finding a safe place to park and sleep.
     It was on one such evening that I found myself, after standing in the rain in the middle of the Globe Theatre watching a production of MacBeth, walking along the River Thames waiting for sundown. I had travelled only a mile or so when I spied the London Tower on the north side and judging that I had sufficient time to visit, crossed the Tower Bridge and did so. I had however, misjudged the approach of night and soon found myself wandering the streets of London, unsure as to which way I had come and able to identify in the poorly lit streets any discernible landmarks. But, as my wanderings had led to other adventures on this trip, I was not worried... until I reached Whitechapel Road.
     The Whitechapel district looked just as it did in all the movies I had seen – fog literally rolled out of the alleys and down the streets like a slow moving river, and every step I took echoed off the cobblestones and came back to me from all sides. Baker’s Street was too far away for the Irregulars to be of any assistance. Had I a Bobbie’s whistle, I would have put it to use, but alas, this contingency was also neglected. I listened in vain for the sound of the Thames – a boat passing, water lapping at the walls that held it in – but heard nothing. I tried to get a sense of moisture blowing in from one direction or another, but the fog that clung to me left everything feeling damp, so I chose a direction and walked.
     And then I saw a light. A simple glow ahead that could have been a window, an open doorway, or a street light. I approached with caution waiting for the fog to clear and discovered the light came from a small doorway just inside a narrow alley. I did approach, and perhaps you think that was foolish. It was, but I was fortunate. For inside this doorway was… not so much a shop, but a room barely larger than a closet containing one set of shelves, a box marked “donations”, and the smell of camphor wood. I leaned in, for there was really not enough room to move about, and looked over the spines of the books. Most were quite large and unwieldy and I had no interest in pulling them off the shelves and disturbing the layers of dust that clung to them. But about knee-high, I saw a bundle of papers wrapped in oil cloth and secured with a leather thong.
     My nerves had had enough for one evening so, pulling some pound notes from my pocket and tossing them into the box, I stepped back into the street and right into the arms of a Bobby who pointed me in the direction home.
     What you now hold in your hands is the result of that night’s adventure. That bundle I found contained the journals of Philip Pirrup, a name I knew well from the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, and despite having taught that novel for fifteen years, there was much more to his story than I knew, and like you, I thought the story Dickens told was a piece of fiction and, in some ways, it was. But as I was to learn from the journals, the “fiction” was the result of a compromise between Dickens and Pirrup.
     I was able to tell the true story of Philip Pirrup and his expectations in Pip and the Zombies and now you get to hear the rest of the story.