Great Expectations

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Great expectations

How does Dickens make his characters memorable and striking?

Charles Dickens is a man that wrote many novels to fascinate us, and his stories want to make the reader read on. Therefore in this essay I will be looking at great expectations and how he makes his characters memorable and striking to the reader. The two characters I will be looking at is miss Havisham and the convict, Also how Dickens creates his characters to be more than what they seem when we first meet them.

                                          When we first meet Pip and the convict Dickens starts to describe the way the churchyard is set out on a ‘raw afternoon towards evening’ The nettles in the yard are overgrown which most likely indicates that nobody hardly goes there. The description of ‘the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard’ suggests that there is nothing to be seen which gives a strong feeling that something may happen to Pip as he visits his mothers and Fathers Tombstones in the churchyard. Dickens also tells us that Pip lives ‘ a mile or more from the church’ which means that Pip is isolated from anything. ‘The church jumped over its own weather-cock.’ This is personification to emphasise the force the convict uses towards Pip.

                                                                 On the other hand we meet miss Havisham who appears in ‘a pretty large room,’ that was ‘well lit with wax candles’ which gives us the impression that she is quite rich. Therefore there was ‘no glimpse of daylight was to be seen it’ which makes us think that she may be a bit strange. We see that Miss Havisham is disorganised because we are told that there are ‘half packed trunks scattered about.’ We also see a shoe on the table which is a sign for bad luck, which we later find out Miss Havisham had bad luck many years ago when she was abandoned at the alter by her to be husband. We then see that miss Havisham is a religious person by the ‘prayer book’ which is lay on her table.

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               Back to the convict it is now time to look at his appearance when he first meets pip in the churchyard. His first appearance is to be a ‘fearful man, all in course grey, with a great iron on his leg.’ This gives us a fully clear picture that the man Pip has bumped into is the convict named Magwitch. ‘A man with no hat, and broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. To me this is very strange considering he has no hat, I think  a hat would ...

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