Great Expectations is a novel written in 1888 by Charles Dickens - The genre of this novel is a mystery - Mystery novels were very popular in the 18th century because crime was very high.

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Great Expectations

Chapter 1 and 39

Great Expectations is a novel written in 1888 by Charles Dickens. The genre of this novel is a mystery. Mystery novels were very popular in the 18th century because crime was very high.

Chapter 1 starts in a “bleak” and “overgrown” churchyard. The weather is stormy and the wind blows from a “distant savage lair”. Dickens uses these descriptions to create a tense atmosphere for the reader. Pirrip Philip nicked named as pip enters the story as a “young” boy looking for his “dead and buried” parents and their “infant children. This shows the reader that he is a lonely orphan and creates sympathy for pip. “Dead and buried” is repeated a number of times. This repletion adds to the tension and gets the reader prepared for something nasty to happen.

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As pip is “wondering” alone in the churchyard the convict jumps out the bushes and grabs pip. He threatens pip with a “terrible voice”. This fits with the atmosphere, which was set in the beginning. The convict is described as a man with “no hat” wearing nothing but  “rags”, “soaked in water”, and “smothered in mud”, and “lamed by stones, and “cut with flints”, and stung by nettles, and “torn by briars”; “who limped, and shivered, and growled”. Although the convict is a “fearful man”, the description of him gives the reader a sense of sympathy for the convict. ...

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