Great Expectations hope that I have shown that the first, eight chapters show Pip's terror of everything but also his potential to succeed

Authors Avatar

Great Expectations

Great Expectations was one of the most popular novels by Charles Dickens and perhaps the one that is most popular today.  I would like to show how he created clear pictures of his characters and settings and make his themes obvious using skilful manipulation of language.

At the beginning of the novel, Dickens describes some graves in a churchyard, and a boy, who is looking at the graves, named Phillip Pirrip but called Pip.  His much older sister, Mrs Joe Gargery, wife of the blacksmith Joe Gargery, looks after Pip.  The graves are those of Pip’s family, his mother, Father and five brothers.  Pip has never seen his mother or father but imagines what they looked like by the shape of their gravestones.  He imagines his father as ‘A square, stout, dark man with black curly hair,’ and pictures his mother as ‘Freckled and sickly.’  Pip then looks at his five brothers tombstones and says to himself,” They gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle,” Pip then goes on to say to himself, “ I am in debt for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouser pockets and had never taken them out in this state of existence.” In this way Dickens makes Pip a sympathetic character because he is without self-pity and is small and bullied by his much older sister.  Furthermore, Dickens description of Mrs Joe, who established a great reputation because she brought Pip up ‘by hand,’ makes the reader sympathise with Pip because he seems to regard her as ‘a force of nature’, against which he is useless to complain.

Join now!

Whilst in the graveyard Pip [he is on his own] is grabbed by an escaped convict.  The convict says to Pip that he wants him to fetch ‘wittles’ [which is an abbreviation for scraps of food] and a file, because the convict still has a chain around his legs.  The convict says to Pip,” You fail or go from my words in particular, no matter how small it is, and your heart and liver shall be tore out and ate.” The convict then says, “ Now I ain’t alone, as you may think I am. There’s a young man hid ...

This is a preview of the whole essay