Explain how the events on the marshes and at Satis house have a powerful impact on Pip.
The marshes and Satis House are both places mentioned in the book which have a strong impact on Pip’s life. They introduced him to death, the class barrier and the feeling of guilt; guilt for being alive as well as the fear of imprisonment. In this essay I will attempt to discover why and how these places affected Pip.
The marshes surrounded the house where Pip grew up so he had been around them all his life. They were called ‘the meshes’ by the locals and described by Dickens as a ‘bleak place’, ‘a dark, flat wilderness’ with ‘a low leaden line beyond’. These are unpleasant images and reflect how Pip feels about the marshes. They conjure up the image of death, smothering everything. They even contain a graveyard, where Pip’s mother, father and little brothers are buried. He calls them ‘little stone lozenges’ due to the shape of the headstones and imagines them to have been born ‘on their back with their hands in their pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence’. This is important because it has social and historical context as at the time of it being written many children died young, many mothers died in childbirth and diseases were rife. The name given to the marshes by the locals (‘the meshes’) suggests that it is easy to get trapped in them, as it is in a mesh. Pip feels trapped by the marshes, as if they are infecting him and calling him to be a criminal. It is on the marshes that he gets his first brush with crime when he meets Magwitch, the escaped convict, who is described as ‘a fierce man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg’. He is made to steal food from Mr. and Mrs. Joe and becomes very paranoid as a result, believing that he will be found out and taken to the gibbet or slung into the hulks, ‘‘every crack in every board, calling after me: ‘Stop thief!’ and ‘Get up, Mrs. Joe!’’. In the distance there is the gibbet where a pirate was once hung, ‘with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate’. Pip feels he is destined to end up in the same place all through the book. He imagines he sees the pirate there, because he is feeling guilty about having stolen food from Mr. and Mrs. Joe. He also imagines Magwitch being like the pirate, ‘The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life.’ The gibbet is his first taste of death. Also in the distance are the hulks, an imposing image of justice on Pip’s life. That is where he is told, and begins to believe, he is headed.
