Having read Great Expectations how effective is the opening chapter? Discuss the methods Dickens used to ensure his readers continuing interest.

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Having read “Great Expectations” how effective is the opening chapter? Discuss the methods Dickens used to ensure his readers continuing interest.

                                “Great Expectations by Charles Dickens”

At first, Dickens has started “Great Expectations” as a little entertaining short story. Quoting Dickens himself from an accompanying note to the first instalment

“I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child & a good – natured foolish man, in relations that seems to me very funny” Throughout the novel “Great Expectations” Pip character and personality goes through some transformations. He is somehow similar at the start and end, but very different while growing up. The novel is a story of an orphan boy called Pip but this in not the first time Dickens uses an orphan character he has another novel called “Oliver Twist” and he is an orphan to.         

Pip is influenced by many characters, but two in particular: Estella, the hard headed girl from the Manor House, and Magwitch, the convict from the marshes. Some things cause strength or growth in a person are responsibility, discipline and surrounding ones self around people who are challenging and inspiring. Pip has dreams and resulting disappointment that eventually lead him to becoming a genuinely good man. During his transformation into adulthood, Pip comes to realise two diverse concept of being a gentlemen and he come to find out the real gentlemen in his life aren’t the people he had initially thought.

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In the first chapter Pip begins the story as a young orphan boy being raised by his sister Mrs. Joes and brother in law Mr Joe the blacksmith in the marsh, in the southeast of England. His name is

 “Pip but it came from Pirrip his father and Christian name Philip”. Pip is a passionate and romantic character; he tends to expect more for him then is reasonable. Pip also has a powerful conscience, and he deeply wants to improve himself, both morally and socially.

Then the next person that shows in the first chapter is the convict he ...

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