However, in extract two, Pip’s environment changes. He is now in the huge house of Miss Havisham. The house is enormous yet it has lost its luster. A lot inside it looks unused, but old. Objects have lost their colours now with a hint of yellow.
“No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it.”
The quote helps to give the feeling of a dark and dreary place. This creates sympathy for Pip because he is in a huge house, that has long not been taken care of or used and he is scared and nervous. As well as this the scene creates sympathy for Pip by putting his in a place which is morbid and lifeless, a place which has no happiness which automatically would bring Pip down. The state of her house and the way Pip feels creates feelings of sympathy for Pip. “…everything with my view which ought to be white had been white long, long ago.”
Again, this provides an old, lonely aroma which could potentially scare Pip. As well as being in a new place, the outlook of everything is a lot for a young boy to take in, for example; Pip says he feels “half afraid”. This setting would possibly make Pip feel uncomfortable. Also, Pip would be confused and nervous about what happened in the beginning for this once magnificent house to look the way it does. “…her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.”
Pip was insecure and unsure of anything, and will want to know more yet hold back with fear.
In extract one, when Pip first encounters Magwitch, he is terrified. The interaction between these two characters is negative. Pip is intimidated by Magwitch. He is a lot taller, older and stronger than Pip.
“…tilted me back … his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine.”
Magwitch is leaning over Pip, making him feel anxious and becoming very scared. Pip is very frightened as he is being threatened by Magwitch. ““O! Don’t cut my throat sir” I pleaded in terror”
This creates sympathy for Pip because he is begging Magwitch not to cut his throat, pleading for his life. This is an intimidating situation for Pip and shows him to be desperate, which is understandable for a young boy in his position.
Dickens wants the reader to feel sympathy for Magwitch as well as Pip. We know that Magwitch is a convict by the way he is described, which does help create feelings for him.
“A fearful man, all coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg.”
This tells us that he is a convict because of the information given to us about the iron at the end of the quote. Additionally, it describes him as “all coarse grey” meaning he was from a prison, probably saying he was prison garbage. He is delineated in a way which makes him sound scared but determined. The fact he is a “fearful man” probably means he frightens others, just like he is doing to Pip. Along with this, Dickens includes a lot of detail about Magwitch’s state of health. This really creates sympathy because to be in that awful mess something horrible must have happened to him. “A man who had been soaked in water and smothered in mud< and lamed by stones and cut by flints…”
This gives the image of Magwitch in the wild; he is wet through, covered in mud and cut quite badly all over. He is in a terrible state here and this creates mixed emotions about Magwitch as he threatens Pip. It raises questions in the reader’s mind as to what actually happened to him, to him act in the manner which he is doing. “While he ate the bread ravenously!”
This concocts the idea that Magwitch is desperate for food, so much so that he threatens a child. Dickens is making the reader understand why Magwitch is threatening Pip. Dickens describes Magwitch to make him intimidating yet helpless.
The sympathy for Magwitch builds up as the interaction between him and Pip grows. When he exits he is described as cold and injured.
“He hugged his shuddering body in both arms as if to hold himself together, and limped toward the church…”
He lives in hope that the boy (Pip) will bring the file he wants and food. At this point Magwitch is very weak, sad. In addition to this he is insecure and vulnerable which makes you feel sorry for him.
Miss Havisham lives alone in a huge house and is lingering in the past. She is broken hearted which creates sympathy because of the way she lives her life. She has not moved on, or changed, she has kept everything the same, even though her lover will never return to her. Dickens does not make her history really obvious he uses the scene to describe how everything has remained the same. The fact he describes her wedding dress which she always wears, leads us to the conclusion that something happened on her wedding day.
“She sat, corpse-like…” Another way we feel sympathy for Miss Havisham is that she is so depressed and set in her ways that we pity her. Also, she is described in a morbid way, a though she isn’t real, like she has no emotions.
However we lose sympathy for Miss Havisham because of the way she responds towards Pip.
“Miss Havisham’s face could not smile.” She wouldn’t smile at Pip or show any gratitude towards him. She just kept a straight face always and never showed him emotions or any reason for Pip to like her. As well as this we can tell she has had a hard life and had a lot to cope with by her description.
“looked as if nothing could ever lift up again” By the description we can suggest that she has looked this way for a very long time, We also get a picture of a droopy looking woman, without a hint of happiness and like she doesn’t know how to have fun.
Having looked closely at how Dickens creates sympathy for his three key characters it has become clear that he creates sympathy for his characters by placing them in unfriendly or unpleasant places. Another technique Dickens has used to create sympathy is through the interaction between characters.
When Pip is put in threatening or intimidating situations it had an adverse effect for some characters. An example of this is when Magwitch is threatening Pop in extract one. For this reason I feel that most sympathy for Pip because nothing happens to eliminate the sympathy created for him. Throughout both extracts Pop is a victim or feels nervous, upset, intimidated or scared. Whereas Miss Havisham is described with words connecting sympathy to death. This is the only other method Dickens uses which works effectively and really helps create a picture of poor heart broken Miss Havisham.
“…no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes” is one example of this method. It creates pity for her from the reader.
Dickens is very successful at building sympathy for each character, especially for Pip who seems to be in unpleasant places a lot of the time. However, it is easy to create sympathy for a child yet for Magwitch it’s harder. The reader has to think about the state Magwitch is in before feeling sympathy for him because he threatens a young boy. Miss Havisham is weird now, emotionless and lifeless which helps create sympathy for her. But our knowledge of her intended manipulation of Estella and Pip brings out her bad qualities. Her bitterness and want for revenge against all men, these are not attractive characteristics which are unlikely to make anyone feel any sympathy for her. So Dickens used his methods of creating sympathy effectively and they worked effectively.
