Dickens in America (Missouri). They are reading "Great Expectations" and some think the novel is too long. Miriam explains to them how the book originally came out in installments. She then does a short performance of Miss Havisham talking about love. Dickens had a chance encounter with Chief Pitchlynn of the Choctaw tribe and discussed American Indian conditions with him. Miriam meets two American Indians, from separate nations, Dana Klar and Noel Frazer, both from the Buder Center for American Indian Studies. They meet at an Indian burial mound and compare conditions now and what they were like in 1842. Dickens wanted to
Miss Havisham dressing, Miss Havisham received a letter from Compeyson and realised he had defrauded her and she had been left at the altar. Humiliated and heartbroken, Miss Havisham suffered a mental breakdown and remained alone in her decaying mansion Satis House – never removing her wedding dress, wearing only one shoe, leaving the wedding breakfast and cake uneaten on the table, and allowing only a few people to see her. She even had the clocks in her mansion stopped at twenty minutes to nine: the exact time when she had received Compeyson's letter. Time passed and Miss Havisham had her lawyer,