In Victorian times the class structure was very well defined and so it was unusual for working class people to rise on the social ladder. Public education had only just begun and was inadequate. Poor children had to earn a living at a young age and there was no social welfare. Infant mortality was high and the scene of Pip’s little dead brothers’ graves in the churchyard would not have been uncommon. Working class people were seen as coarse and ugly while the middle class aspired to be refined and delicate. Dickens’ treatment of these attitudes is sensitive and perceptive.
Dickens begins by creating the character of Pip – the poor young orphan boy. The story is told by him so we see everything through his eyes and are led to sympathise with him. Pip is portrayed as a sweet and endearing character from the opening lines of the novel:
‘My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.’
Even his name is a nickname although it is sad that he had to give himself the nickname. Dickens takes the reader to Pip’s first defining memory – a small child, quite alone studying the graves of his mother, father and five infant brothers in a bleak windswept churchyard. Our sympathy is aroused by this opening scene. His pathetic imagining of the appearance of his father and mother by the shape of the letters on the gravestone and that his dead brothers ‘ had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets’ emphasises his childishness. Pip’s perception of himself is pathetic:
‘…the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.’
Then Magwitch appears and Pip’s speech is that of a small child with short frightened utterances. His description of the churchyard turning over as Magwitch turns him upside-down is both comical and childish along with his fear that Magwitch will actually eat his cheeks.
Magwitch is at first a terrifying figure as he looms out of the graves (every child’s worst nightmare). However, we start to feel sympathy with him straight away as Pip describes how he is wet and muddy and lame and hurt. He is rough and speaks with an uneducated accent and manhandles Pip but he is obviously quite desperate as he has to put all his hope for help in a small, frightened boy. He is also completely alone in the world. He clearly knows how to speak to children: he uses a mixture of wild threats and careful questioning to make sure Pip has understood what he wants. Although he is terrifying to Pip he has a comical side to the reader: for instance, when he runs away at the mention of Pip’s mother (this also shows how afraid HE is), and when he is threatening Pip with the non-existent ‘young man’. Pip clearly has sympathy for Magwitch as he describes him limping off:
‘ At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms – clasping himself, as if to hold himself together – and limped towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.’ We see him as a broken, hunted man. Are the hands of the dead bodies, reaching up to drag him into their hell, like the soldiers who are trying to catch him and drag him back into his own hell? The reader can’t help but feel sympathy for Magwitch when he says:
“I wish I was a frog. Or a eel.”
The fact that the landscape and setting of this episode are so bleak and inhospitable leads us to be sympathetic with both of these characters. It is dusk, wintry, wet and windswept. Pip’s description of the place sets the scene:
‘ … and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea.’ Dickens uses pairs of powerful adjectives and a rhythmic list of items to build up the image. This is almost like poetry. When he first describes Magwitch, Dickens uses this same technique of building a long rhythmic list of attributes with strong adjectives which build a very vivid image. Dickens read his books aloud at public readings and we can see how the pace of these descriptions, piling image after image would be very powerful. The last paragraph of this chapter echoes Pip’s first description of the marshes but adds the blackness of the place and the gloomy images of the sailors’ beacon and the gibbet:
‘the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright’. The ‘savage lair from which the wind was rushing’ and ‘the sky was just a row of long, angry, red lines and dense black lines intermixed.’ Are both powerful images of an actively alien landscape which threatens our two heroes.
In chapter eight Pip is summoned to visit Miss Havisham and play. At first we sympathise with Miss Havisham, the reader is struck by the poignant image of the shrivelled, white-haired bride. Dickens paints the Image of a weak and frail woman, dead inside:
‘I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left… the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone.’
He then heightens the sympathy by revealing how isolated she truly is. This is shown when she asks Pip:
“You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?” this is also shown when she says:
“I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of weeks of the year.”
This isolation and refusal to except the destruction of her seemingly only hope for happiness has turned her into a jaded and cruel old lady. It is evident that she is very twisted from early on in the chapter. But the reader only starts to lose sympathy for her and see the cruel and dangerous implications of her bitterness when Estella enters and Miss Havisham lets her verbally abuse Pip, and whispers to Estella:
“Well! You can break his heart.”
Dickens portrays a vivid picture of a sinister, decaying, shell of a house which reflects Miss Havisham as they are both empty and obsolete without the husband. The repetition of
‘…once white, now yellow’ reinforces this.
As Pip enters Miss Havisham’s room the reader identifies with his fear and apprehension of this strange new place and person. The house and the room both, although decaying along with Miss Havisham, are on a grand scale that Pip has never seen before. Also the image of the ‘corpse-like’ woman would be enough to petrify any young child. After Estella enters our sympathy for Pip grows as he quietly takes her snobbish analysis of him without defending himself. His new found hate for his appearance and him seemingly agreeing with her that he is a lesser person is very sad. At this point he learns to be ashamed of his background, and this is the first moment that he starts to reject the only true friend of his childhood – Joe Gargery. This feeling grows as he rises in society later in the novel.
There is a contrast in the way Dickens creates sympathy in the chapters discussed so far and chapter twenty five where Pip goes to visit Wemmick at his house. There is a certain sympathetic fondness felt for Wemmick although it is a lot more subtle than the other characters studied. Dickens uses comedy around this character to create sympathy. The reader feels for Wemmick as he has to care for his elderly father; however the impression given is that he does this more out of love than duty. He calls him ‘the Aged’ which is an affectionate name. Having said this he is quite apologetic when introducing him to Pip:
“You wouldn’t mind being at once introduced to the Aged, would you? It wouldn’t put you out?” this extremely polite and kindly tone endears us to him further. Wemmick lives in a ‘home made castle’ which Pip describes as:
‘…the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater of them sham), and a gothic door, almost too small to get in at.’
This ridiculous image along with the four foot moat (which is described as a ‘chasm’) is very comical to the reader. Like Miss Havisham Wemmick has created his own isolated world where he can cut himself off from the outside world. Unlike Miss. Havisham he loves it and is happy. Wemmick’s and Miss. Havisham’s homes reflect their characters: Wemmick’s is a comical, odd little house which was made with love and care; Miss Havisham’s is a dark and decaying shell. His house is his secret place, where he doesn’t invite anyone from work and where he becomes relaxed and happy - his face and attitude change when he is at home. When he returns to work at the end of the chapter, he gets ‘dryer and harder’. The obvious pride that Wemmick feels in his house and his achievement in building it endears him to Pip and to the reader. ‘ “My own doing,” said Wemmick. “Looks pretty; don’t it?” ’ He is almost childlike in this pride:
“That’s a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up – so – and cut off the communications.” He is breathless in his eagerness to show it off to Pip.
Dickens creates a scene almost of farce, with the ‘Aged,’ who is stone deaf: where Pip and Wemmick are nodding away to communicate with him. This culminates with the firing of the gun when Pip nods so much that he can’t see the old man any more. The scene is treated with affectionate humour and Pip’s slightly sarcastic description of the wonders of the miniature castle. The bower where they drink their punch, where the island in the lake ‘might have been the salad for supper’, and the mill-stream that ‘played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet’ are both examples of his affectionate sarcasm, indicating Pip’s feeling that the whole situation is comic and that he himself is slightly superior to Wemmick. In this chapter the reader cannot help but feel affection for Wemmick – for his ingenious creativity in the home he has made; for his care and love for ‘the Aged’; and for his pride and delight in his achievement. Comedy is just one of the methods that Dickens uses to create sympathy for his characters. In this case he uses it to build a whole comic picture, but in other situations such as with Magwitch he uses it interspersed with fear and horror to invite sympathy.
Great Expectations was first written to be serialised in weekly papers. This, to a certain extent, governed the style and characters as each chapter must be self sufficient and equally as exciting. This means that the pace and intrigue of the novel is kept constant which shows Dickens’ great skill as a writer. Throughout Dickens’ novels his careful choice of names indicates the characters well – Pip, a small sweet name for a small sweet boy; Magwitch – is he a witch? Or evil? In the first chapter he shows amazing descriptive skill, for example when referring to the cold, wilderness of the marshes. In chapter eight he manages to create huge sympathy for a character then take it away a few lines later. This shows his careful control over the reader’s emotion. He also shows great skill when in chapter twenty five he successfully achieves comedy while creating sympathy for a character. By far Dickens’ biggest achievement, which is sometimes lost in more modern literature, is his talent for telling a gripping and enthralling tale while highlighting the social issues of the day.
