In the first chapter of the novel Great Expectations, Dickens prepares the ground for the way the story will develop. I will show how he does this through his piece of coursework.

Magwitch enters his relationship with the reader as a mysterious villain who attacks the young Pip in a graveyard. At this stage you don’t know he is an escaped prisoner. But there are a few things to bear in mind firstly the person giving the account of the attack is Pip (as an adult) and secondly Pip is actually Dickens so although Dickens/Pip recalls this attack they make it sound almost comical this very cleverly leaves an opening for Magwitch to return into Pips life, although at this time the reader doesn’t know nothing about it, and it is not blazingly obvious until you have read and studied the whole of the novel exactly what is going on at this stage in the story. Now this leaves two possible meanings either (a) Pip the adult narrator is trying to be sympathetic to his ex benefactor and someone who he built a close personal attachment to before he died, or option (b) that Dickens just planned out the story without realism that he was creating links between the two characters. Option (a) in my opinion is almost certainly the correct choice, because Dickens at this stage has written several novels and knows what he is doing and was simply just to clever to let something like this just happen.

Hints are left in the plot for the reader to decipher these eventually result in a cliff-hangers, this was necessary in Great Expectations because the novel was published in sections, so to get the reader to by the next instalment the writer who is Dickens simply puts in a multiple option ending. The same thing is done today in T.V. programmes that run for more that one show and also at the advertisement breaks during programmes. Although this was often seen as a weakness in Dickens work, I do not feel it has an adverse effect on the story because as soon as there is a cliff hanger there is not because you have read the next part of the story.

The story starts of with this picture in the readers head, a dark and foggy churchyard where it is very cold and there is just bleak wherever you look and there is graves with grass coming out of them because they have not been cared for and there is an eerie silence. This is the perfect place to show Pip and Magwitch because it shows there unhappiness and there loneliness and the fear that they both have. It sets the scene very well. Dickens does this very well throughout the story, other examples of it are the second meeting between Pip and Magwitch, and when they try to get Magwitch out of the Country.

Out of all of Dickens skills by far the thing he excelled in best was the use of language. As you have already read Dickens used Characterisation to manipulate the story and the reader, but he also did as any writer does used the power of words to bring his story to life, to change it from a boring text to a bleak marsh. The cleverest thing about Dickens use of language is he doesn’t actually do it, it is the reader who takes the words and turns them into a story, another way of putting it is that a book can be transcribed into a hundred different languages but if it is read by a million different people it will do a million different things the author can only drop hints as to what your brain is supposed to make of the story. What I am trying to say is that all an author can do is try to guide a person through a book but the book will take on different meanings to different people.

Dickens first play with language is the self naming of ‘Pip’ this is important because it instigates the whole theme of identity in the novel. The next thing Dickens does is to entertain the reader with Pips amusing reading of his family graves. Then this introduction into young Pips growing awareness of ‘the identity of things’ is violently interrupted by the sound of a ‘terrible voice’ that demands ‘wittles’ and a file and threatens that if not awful things will happen.