imagery, the “great front entrance had two chains across it outside” (chapter 8 page 54). From the
description of Satis House we understand more about the character of its inhabitant, Miss
Havisham, who has made the house grow old with her, without looking after it as she doesn’t look
after herself, and has actually blocked out the outside world and made Satis house her own ‘prison’.
Mr. Jaggers’ office is another very much illustrated location (chapter 20 page 160):
“dismal”, “eccentrically patched”, “broken”, “distorted”, “twisted”, “odd”, “dreadful”, “rusty”,
“greasy”, “deadly”. On the whole there is an atmosphere of death and decay, also thanks to the very
grotesque description of Mr. Jaggers’ own “high-backed chair of deadly black horse-hair, with rows
of brass nails round it, like a coffin;” (chapter 20 page 160). We deduce that Mr. Jaggers is quite an
odd individual, not very human, and closer to death than to life.
Barnard’s Inn is the place Pip is to be established in during his stay in London. He has some
expectations to what it is to be like, but on his arrival there finds it the “dingiest collection of
shabby buildings ever squeezed together” (chapter 21 page 168). It is a “dismal” place (Dickens
repeats this word four times in one sentence), “melancholic”, “rotten”, “dilapidated”, “crippled”,
“cracked”, “collapsing”, “miserable” and “empty” (chapter 21 page 168). In this setting, other than
the element of ruin there is an element of death present, especially in the following two sentences:
“A frouzy mourning of soot and smoke” (mourning is usually meant by the remembrance of the
deceased) and “I opened the staircase window and nearly beheaded myself…it came down like the
guillotine” (chapter 21 page 169).
Wemmick’s castle is one of the most ‘normal’ households in ‘Great Expectations’. It is
situated in the district of Walworth, which already tells us something about it and its inhabitants:
that they are worth something. It is “a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the
top of it cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns” (chapter 25 page 202). It is an
extremely small house, the smallest house Pip ever saw, but its particularity is that it is made to
resemble by many means a castle. It has a flagstaff, a drawbridge (“a plank”) and a moat (“a chasm
about four feet wide and two deep”). It also has what Wemmick calls an ornamental lake (“which,
when you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it
made the back of your hand quite wet”). The whole imagery of this castle signifies Wemmick’s
desire of leaving behind his work and his office; as he says himself, “the office is one thing, and
private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into
the Castle, I leave the office behind me” (chapter 25 page 204). Wemmick is also the only example
in the novel of a ‘normal’ family: the ‘Aged parent’ is “clean”, “cheerful”, and “comfortable” but
most of all “cared for”.
Mr. Jaggers’ home is located in the district of Little Britain, which means it encloses most of
the negative aspects of life in Britain in those days. It is “dolefully in want of painting, and with
dirty windows” (chapter 26 page 207). The house is made up of a “stone hall, bare gloomy and little
used” and “three dark brown rooms on the first floor”(chapter 26 page 207). The “carved garlands
on the panelled walls” (chapter 26 page 207) remind Pip of nooses, returning to the element of
death. We also notice that Mr. Jaggers’ bookcase contains only books about “evidence, criminal
law, criminal biography, trials and acts of parliament”, and that there is also a “little table of papers
with a shaded lamp” (chapter 26 page 208): unlike Wemmick, he has no private life, but brings his
work home too. He has no family, no friends: the only important thing in his life is his job.
From this analysis we can see that in ‘Great Expectations’ Dickens uses very successfully
many other different narrative techniques other than basic description, and that the portrayal of
settings can give us a great deal of information on character and other aspects.
