Tom Jackson
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is an Autobiographical Novel written by Charles Dickens between 1860 and 1861 because it was written in instalments in magazines. Charles Dickens was a social reformer who wrote boos about the working class people and the daily struggles, to try to get people to understand how life was like for the working class.
The first chapter quickly introduces Pip and the fact that he is living with his sister and Joe Gargery, the local blacksmith as his parents are dead. It also introduces Magwitch, who takes advantage of Pips young and quite timid demeanour to get his own way.
Finally the first chapter introduces several key themes that are developed during the rest of the novel, such as the divide between rich and poor and people who are considered gentlemen and the lower classes, who in the majority of cases turned out to be more polite than the richer class people.
This chapter introduces Magwitch, an escaped convict, Joe Gargery, the local blacksmith, Pip the main character or protagonist, Pips sister, whom Pip lives with after the rest of his family died.
Initially out sympathies are with Pip, as he is a very young, very small boy in a graveyard, at night, where an escaped convict (Magwitch) is laying low. When suddenly the criminal appears and starts threatening Pip “Stay still you little devil or I’ll cut your throat” Dickens uses quit strong language in this sentence to grab the readers attention and the immediately place Magwitch in a powerful position. This makes the reader feel no sympathy for the convict, however at the end when the convict is running of Pip imagines that “the hands of the people in the graves were reaching up trying to pull him into the ground” this helps you imagine the look of Magwitch as a very malnourished, dirty, weak person, which is reinforced from the long sentence in Paragraph 4 ”A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head. A man who had been soaked in water and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones and cut by flints and stung by nettles and torn by briars, who limped, and shivered and glared and growled” this has a lot of ands in it make it seem even longer, and this sentence also makes have some sympathy for the convict as he has already being through a lot and could almost be forgiven for picking on this young boy.
