The place Pip is in is a churchyard and Dickens goes on to describe it as bleak and overgrown with nettles. He uses negative language to create a setting of bleak and colourless place as nettles are seen as negative objects. The theme of death arises again at the end of that sentence as it finishes with the words “dead and buried”.
Dickens then continues to describe the marshland outside the churchyard as dark and flat implying that it is featureless – no landmarks, bringing back the themes of colourless and negativity. He also utilises the classic sentence formation of a list of three things in, “with dykes and mounds and gates” and “the low, leaden, line beyond” where he also makes effective use of alliteration. In addition he mentions “scattered cattle” implying that there is no order to this landscape, or even to the little “life” that exists there.
The brilliant phrase,
“the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea”,
uses language very effectively to create a powerful metaphor having the sea as a wild beast in its lair from which the wind as running away.
The quote,
“and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead”,
tells us that Pips family was a typical Victorian one - large with high infant mortality. This reflects Dickens own family. Dickens like Pip was brought up near the coast – in fact his life had many similarities to Pips so much so that people have suggested that Great Expectations is close to an autobiography of Dickens. Dickens also did not like the menial job he had when he was younger and thought he was to good for his station, as Pip does later on in the novel. Dickens’s father was imprisoned for debt at one time and Dickens and his family were imprisoned with him. This meant that he would have met convicts and knew what they were like, just as Pip meets one in the churchyard.
Dickens uses language to give us our first impression of the convict’s character before we have even seen him. First thing we get is his voice, ““Hold your noise” cried a terrible voice”,
Dickens use of the word terrible sets the scene, implying that it is loud and frightening, striking terror into Pip.
Next the man appears himself,
“a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch”
started up suggests that he came from nowhere and the fact the it was from “among the graves” makes him a bit spooky as though he had just risen from one of them!
The convicts next words are,
“keep still you little devil or I’ll cut your throat!”,
they are a sudden threat to Pip and probably would have terrified him.
Dickens describes the prisoner as,
“a fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg.”
The man’s clothing reflects Dickens themes as rough and colourless and the iron represents the fact that he is a prisoner. The man has “no hat, and and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head”,
to Pip it would have been very shocking to see a man without a hat, also the fact that the convicts clothes are described as “old” and “broken” suggests that this is a reflection of the convict and he is also old and broken. The convict is described in a detailed long descriptive paragraph typical of Dickens, also using alliteration effectively for example:
“glared and growled”.
Towards the end of the chapter Dickens describes the marshes again, “The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lined and dense black lines intermixed.”
Once again Dickens used language effectively to describe the place, for example the marshes are “black” implying them to be colourless and bleak, while the sky is “angry” and “red” as though the place itself is angry.
He goes onto say that,
“I could faintly make out the only two black things standing upright … …… the other a gibbet with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again.”
This is effective as Pip mixes up the images of the pirate and the convict in his head, and Dickens also uses personification:
“as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to gaze after him, I wondered if they thought so too.”
Dickens effectively uses the language to show us the idea of the convict and the pirate coming to life mixed up together terrifies Pip until:
“But, now I was frightened again and ran home without stopping.”
This chapter effectively sets up the events to come by introducing a sense of the colourless and bleak world that Pip inhabits and which is built on in the rest of the book. It also introduces us to the writer’s skill with language when he describes the place and characters, showing his skill at detailed descriptions and demonstrating how effectively he uses the language.