Miss Havisham first impression

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Freya Boyd

What is the reader’s first impression of Miss Havisham, and how does Dickens shape our first impressions?

    One of the main characters of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations is Miss Havisham. Throughout the course of the novel, we discover lots about her and her life, especially in the first part of chapter 8 in the story. The main thing we discover about Miss Havisham, is that 20 years ago she was unfortunately jilted at the alter, and this has greatly affected her ever since. In this essay, I am going to discuss and explain the ways in which Dickens clever shapes the readers opinion of Miss Havisham, and the views we have on her because of this.

    The main way I believe that Dickens shapes the readers first impression of Miss Havisham, is by writing about her description through the eyes of Pip. Pip is the main character in the novel, and we learn from earlier that he is from an extremely poor background, and as he is naïve and from an age where he is easily influenced by what is around him, especially because of his dream to be a ‘gentleman’.

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    Being from such a poor family, as Pip enters Miss Havisham’s house everything appears even more elegant and expensive that is really is, as he has never seen objects like this before. When Pip explains the room Miss Havisham lives in, we get the impression that Miss Havisham has become a hermit since she was left by her husband to be. She appears to have absolutely no life as nothing appears to have changed in the room since that day, for example, she is still wearing her white wedding dress, which has turned to a rotten yellow due ...

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