Chapter 1 of "Great Expectation" has been described as one of the most memorable in English Literature. Discuss this and give reasons whether you agree or not and why.

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Chapter 1 of “Great Expectation” has been described as one of the most memorable in English Literature. Discuss this and give reasons whether you agree or not and why.

Dickens generates interest in Pip and also makes you feel sorry for him through the use of many techniques. One of these techniques is in the manner he explains Pip’s name. Dickens describes how Pip taught himself his name from his father’s tombstone and also of his sister “Mrs. Joe Gargery”. He learned his family name Pirrip from his father’s grave and his sister, Mrs Joes Gargery, taught him that his Christian name was Philip. Pip’s “infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip”, so this is what he called himself.

   The manner in which Pip tells us about his family is interesting. It starts off with us knowing that only his father is dead, but through time it

builds up to tell you that his mother is also dead along with his five little brothers. Pip imagined what his parents would have looked like. He imagined his father as, “square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair”. Pip imagined his father like that due to the shape of his tombstone and the shape of the letters on it.

    He imagined what his mother looked like by the shape of her tombstone and from the “character and turn of the inscription”, which said “Also Georgiana Wife of the above”.

   Pip said that he drew a childish conclusion that his mother was “freckled and sickly”.

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   He also said that his brothers “gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle”.

   Dickens generates feelings of both interest and sympathy, at the same time, through the effective description of the surroundings. “marsh country, down by the river, within, as, the river wound, twenty miles of sea” He describes it as their “marsh country” as if it belongs to him.

“distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing” makes it sound gloomy and sombre.

   This is also linked to the way Dickens’ presentation of the convict immediately grabs our ...

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