As Dickens started to write Oliver Twist he delved into the world of cruelty that children suffer at the hands of society. Oliver Twist was a great hit with the Victorian audience. He followed this success with other great novels such as; Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.
Great Expectations is regarded by many as Charles Dickens’ best work.. But one of the well-known tales behind the story is that his friend Bulwer Lytton persuaded Dickens to change the ending to a more favourable one. He changed the first ending of Great Expectations from Pip and Estella meeting then going their separate ways for good to leaving it open for the reader to decide whether or not Estella or Pip stay together.
In the first chapter of Great Expectations we meet a young lad called Phillip Pirrip but everyone just called him Pip. He is going to visit the gravestones of his parents and his brother. He talks about how he has an idea of what sort of person his parents were by the writing on their gravestones.
“The letters on my father’s gave me the odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair.”
Also the impression of his mother was “freckled and sickly.”
Beside the grave of his mother were “five stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long”. These stones represented his brothers that “gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle”.
Pip then goes on to talk about were he lives. “Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within as the river, wound twenty miles of the sea.”
Charles Dickens is well known for many things, as well as the use of literature tools. The next few lines of this chapter displays how Pip is feeling through describing the scenery. This is called pathetic fallacy. An example of this is, “that this bleak place overgrown with nettles…” and “dark flat wilderness…” These quotes show that Pip is feeling very much alone.
A ‘fearful man’ who grabbed Pip by the neck then approaches and starts questioning Pip. After a few questions the ‘fearful man’ threatens to get one of his friends to kill Pip if he doesn’t bring him some whittles (scraps of food) and a file. While the ‘fearful man’ is walking away from Pip he comes to some sort of decision that the man is a convict of some sort. Then Pip got frightened and ran home.
During this chapter we are introduced to Pip with his grim family history, the convict and we find out who Pip lives with (Mrs Joe Gargery and her husband Mr Joe Gargery)
Pip himself is describing these events and he dose through the whole book.
In this chapter the two main characters are Pip and the Convict. Both of them are described quite well. Pip is seen as a young orphaned boy who lives with his sister and her husband. And the convict is displayed as a threatening mad man that has been put through hell.
