Pip’s imagination is often found along with another emotion, guilt. Guilt is shown strongly when Pip steals from his sister Mrs Gargery and his imagination shows this through personification. Pip makes the cows in the fields talk to him and the steps in his house try and stop him ‘get up, Mrs Joe’ ‘stop, thief!’
The fact that Dickens shows another of Pips main emotions as guilt, shows that Pip has yet to have a good and happy emotion this leads us to believe he lives an unhappy life and that all children do.
Also two other characteristics that occur a lot in the novel shows Dickens views of childhood are naivety and innocence. The innocence in Pip is shown because he is always polite towards the convict even when he’s hurting him ‘goo-good-night, sir,’ This shows that children are brought up to be well mannered towards their elders and are too innocent to know that the man was a convict. Pip shows his naivety when he believes if he doesn’t do as the convict says he will be attacked by another man, the young man, ‘I was in mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver’ this shows how naive children are because Pip believed in a made up man and didn’t think once about questioning the convict about this man.
The final way Dickens shows the horror of childhood through Pip is by the way Pip acts. Pip is always trying to make any possible improvement to himself by advancement in education and social class. ‘What a scholar you are.’ This is shown through the fact that Pip enjoys writing and school and wants to further his knowledge. Pips improvement of social class is shown through the fact that he wants to marry into a higher class. By attempting to improve himself Dickens makes the reader feel Pip knows he’s no good as a child and that he needs to improve himself to be accepted.
Dickens shows his views of childhood through another character, Estella. Estella shows the reader that Dickens believed that you could create a child in any way you wanted and in Estella’s case she was created to torment men and ‘break their hearts’. Estella shows us that because of how bad her childhood was she is no longer able to love. We know this because she tells Pip she has ‘no heart’. This tells us that her childhood wasn’t a nice time for her and has scarred her for life. Estella also shows us the cruelty of childhood in the way she treats Pip. She shows us by leading Pip on and breaking his heart several times while he’s growing up.
Another way Estella shows us the cruelty of childhood is the fact we are told that she is an orphan as well like Pip and she also lost her parents at a young age the fact that this has happened to both the children characters in the novel so far leads us to believe that it happened very often back when the novel was wrote and that most children were unhappy because they have lost their parents. We are given the impression at the very end of the novel that Estella’s father is the convict and that they had been separated from each other their whole lives and will never meet because he dies before he gets a chance to see her.
In this novel childhood comes across as being the worst time in your life and that it was terrible to be a child.