During Pip’s first week in London at the dawn of his expectations, Mr. Wemmick gives him a bit of advice that could serve neatly as an epigraph for the novel. “It don’t signify to you with your brilliant look-out,” he says, “but as to myself, my guiding-star always is, ‘Get hold of portable property.’” The remark comes as they stand in Jaggers’s office and Wemmick, like the curator of a seedy menagerie, shows Pip the bizarre relics left by clients who have gone to the gallows: Wemmick’s brooch and mourning-rings, the seals hanging from his watch-chain, and “the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them” that Wemmick apostrophizes during the scene (156).