Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s…

The scene is in chapter 40 of Great Expectations. Pip has just learned that his secret benefactor is not Miss Havisham, as he had always believed, but Abel Magwitch, the convict he helped as a child, and he asks the lawyer Jaggers to confirm it. Jaggers is cautious to the point of comedy: he makes Pip say “informed” rather than “told”, since “You can’t have verbal communication with a man in New South Wales”. Magwitch, transported for life, risks the gallows by being back in London, and Jaggers does not want to know it. When Pip pleads that it all “looked so like it”, the lawyer replies: “Not a particle of evidence, Pip”, then gives this rule.

Dickens published the novel in weekly instalments in his magazine All the Year Round in 1860 and 1861. The rule sums up its lesson: Pip has built his hopes, and his snobbery, on appearances. Jaggers, who trusts only proof, puts into one sentence what Pip has learned the hard way.

Great Expectations, Chapter 40 (Mr Jaggers), 1861

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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