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. The convict threatens to cut pips throat. Pip pleads in “terror” to the convict not to cut his throat. The convict says to pip “Now lookee ere, you what wittles is?” pip answers in fright “yes sir”. The words in written dialogue of the convict are sometimes spelt differently to make the character of the convict more real. The convict tells pip to bring the wittles early tomorrow morning. He sits pip onto a tombstone and says to pip in “fearful terms”, “you fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted, and ate”. This threat gives the reader a sense of fear for pips life.
Later on in the story pip has a change of luck in his life, where he is picked to travel to London and become a gentleman.
Pip is now twenty-three years old, he is a young gentleman, he is earning a lot of money and shares a flat with his friend Mr Herbert Pocket.
Pip is on his own in the flat because Herbert is away on business in Marseilles. The weather outside is “Wretched; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; mud, mud, mud deep in the streets”. “Violent” blasts of rain. Windmills have been carried away, along the coasts are shipwrecks and “death” caused by the “rages” of wind. Like in the first chapter uses the description of the weather to create a tense atmosphere. The lights in the staircase suddenly blow out. The church clocks in the City struck but wind is “curiously flawed” by the wind. This adds to the tension and gets the reader ready for the next meeting of the convict.
Pip is listening for the wind when he starts to hear a footstep on the stair. Pip walks out of his room to the top of the staircase with a table lamp. He calls down the stairs. The convict calls back from the “darkness beneath”. The convict climbs up the stairs towards pip. As the convict gets closer to the pip he has an “incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased” by the sight of pip. Dickens describes the convict as a man with “long iron-grey hair, aged about sixty, strong, and browned and hardened by exposure to weather”. The convict holds out both his hands out to pip. Unlike the 1st meeting the convict is pleased to see pip.
I conclude chapters 1 and 39 are similar but have some differences. Both meetings are very similar. Both have tension build ups just before the meeting. But the difference is that in chapter 1 the convict was treating to slit pips throat and tries to scare him, in chapter 39 the convict held his hands out to Pip. Dickens was trying to show the reader Pip wanted to believe that Miss Havisham help him to become a gentleman not the convict.