How did Magwitch receive the verdict?

In Chapter 56, Abel Magwitch receives his verdict of capital punishment quite stoically. As a criminal who had already been sentenced to deportation for earlier crimes, Magwitch is well aware that he faces the death penalty if arrested back in England. His killing of Compeyson during his attempted escape makes this verdict a certainty. He immediately accepts the judge's sentence as inevitable and even proper saying to the court, "My Lord, I have received my sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours."
When Pip visits Magwitch in the infirmary after the trial has ended, he finds his friend in better spirits than before. He knows that he is guilty of many crimes and that he is facing his punishment for them. Additionally, Magwitch is in poor health and is dying anyway. Therefore, a sentence of death is actually of little consequence to him. Fortunately for Magwitch, he has Pip there to comfort him during his final minutes of life and dies peacefully having heard that his daughter Estella is alive and well.


Despite the best efforts of Pip and Herbert Pocket to spirit him out of the country, Magwitch has been apprehended. He was betrayed by Compeyson, who is drowned in his ensuing struggle with Magwitch on the Thames. The lawyer Jaggers expects that when Magwitch's case comes to trial he'll be found guilty and sentenced to death, and that's precisely what happens. Yet when the judge reads out the guilty verdict, Magwitch is accepting of his fate. He tells the judge that his imminent death has been decreed by God as an act of forgiveness. Magwitch has spent virtually his whole adult life on the wrong side of the law; society has never been able to forgive him for what he's done. Yet Magwitch, in his simple, uncomplaining faith, fervently believes that God, in ordaining his death, bestows the kind of forgiveness on him he was always unable to receive from his fellow men.

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