The novel begins with Phillip Pirrip, the first person narrator, telling the reader how he came to call himself Pip. The book’s introduction presents us with the depressing picture of Pip’s origins: he is an orphan who has christened himself ‘Pip’. It is a sad scene as Pip imagines his parents from the lettering on their tombstones, visualizing his mother who is “freckled and sickly” and his father who is “a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair”. The “five little stone lozenges” representing the graves of “five little brothers” adds a particularly tragic note.
The third paragraph of Chapter One focuses on the setting of “this bleak place”. It is gloomy and lonely in “the dark flat wilderness”. The sense of bleak isolation is reinforced by the “Low leaden line” of the sea, which follows. In the midst of this depressing scene, Pip is first “a small bundle of shivers”.
Feeling the burden of his orphanhood, Pip has started to cry when “a terrible voice” tells him to be quiet and threatens to cut his throat. Then “ a fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg” appears from among the graves. The grim mood suggested by the unfriendly and threatening marsh turns to one of violence and horrific threat with the sudden appearance of the convict.
It does not take much imagination to appreciate the frightening effect of the convict’s arrival on Pip. This “small bumble of shivers” is already frightened by the landscape and, starting to cry from sheer mental and physical desolation, he is terrified by the sudden appearance of the convict. The convict’s bloodthirsty threats and his filthy exterior do not endear him to either Pip or to the reader.
When Pip tells us the convict “turned me upside down” we realise, in the light of what happens later in the novel, that this is an important statement. The irony lies in the fact that from this print on, Pip’s world is turned upside down. His future will be affected by this meeting for this is the introduction of Magwitch who will become Pip’s benefactor.
Despite his sudden and fearful appearance, the human personality of the convict begins to show during the dialogue, which follows. There is grim humour in Magwitch’s inquisition of Pip and use of dialect, e.g. “wittles”. Again the reader is moved by the pathos in Pip only knowing his parents as inscriptions on tombstones. We soon realise that Magwitch has no intention of killing Pip; he wants to frighten Pip into doing what he wants: “suppose you’re kindly let line, which I han’t made up my mind about”.
When Magwitch learns that Pip’s sister’s husband is a blacksmith, he orders Pip to bring him a file and food early the following morning and further threatens Pip with a brutal young man who “has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart and at his liver”. The irony here is that Magwitch is inventing the other man in order to frighten Pip into obedience; what Magwitch does not know is that there will be another convict in the marshes.
When Pip agrees to Magwitch’s demand, the convict releases him. The fact that Pip must steal the file from Joe Gargery and the food from his sister means that he is implicated in the crime and is tied to Magwitch in a way which he does not yet understand.
The picture of Magwitch after Pip and he part is a pathetic one: “he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms-clasping himself, as if to hold himself together.” Magwitch is an escaped convict and the victim of a brutal penal system, which Dickens was very critical of in several of his novels. The leg iron is the emblem of the convict but the “gibbet, with some chains hanging to it” which is mentioned in the final paragraph of the chapter emphasizes the barbarity of the penal system, which existed at that time. The image of the convict limping towards the gibbet carries a powerful suggestion of impending doom.
The final paragraph of the chapter again focuses on the bleak landscape, which is reduced to black and red lines: “The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then”; “the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed”. The black and red imagery might suggest darkness and blood.
In conclusion, I believe that Chapter one of Great Expectations a perfect opening. We are introduced to two of the main characters: the narrator Pip and the dangerous but pathetically vulnerable Magwitch. The tense atmosphere, which arises from the bleak landscape and the appearance of a desperate convict, grip the reader’s attention completely. In addition, Magwitch’s demands upon Pip whet our curiosity and ensure that we will want to read on.
