At the beginning Pip is about seven years old. Dickens skillfully catches the reader's attention and sympathy in the first few pages, introduces several major themes, creates a mood of mystery in a lonely setting, and gets the plot moving immediately. The first chapter instantly involves the reader because of Pip's terrifying encounter with the convict and the humor with which the chapter is infused. Pip is alone, physically alone in the cemetery and solitary in being an orphan; his aloneness prefigures the isolation he will experience later in the novel. His illusions about his family's tombstones are comic and convincing as the sort of misreading that a child might make; they also introduce the theme of failure to communicate. Pip’s only gateway in telling what his parents were like was to analyze the shape of the letters on his parent’s tombstones. ‘The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, `Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,' I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.’ This shows that Pip doesn’t really know how to interpret people. He has no sense of where comes from or who he is as his guardians died when he was very young. Dickens creates empathy for Pip as we see how much he didn’t know his parents at all.
Whilst Pip was so interested in the tombstones, he gets frightened by a strange creature like man. Pip is automatically scared for his life, `O! Don't cut my throat, sir,' I pleaded in terror. `Pray don't do it, sir.' The convict (Magwitch) orders Pip to get him some food and a filer. Pip has no other choice but to follow the Magwitch demands. As Pip is scared to the core by the convict he obeys him and steals from his sister. This is when Pip’s life changes forever, without him even knowing. We become aware of crime in the first chapter. A convicted criminal whose sentence was to starve to death in a graveyard, orders another being to commit a crime for him. Pips punishment for his crime was to be sent to a house to ‘play’. This is where the setting and atmosphere becomes very gothic like.
Mrs Havisham is an owner of a very big house where hardly anyone lives and seems to be stuck in time, literally. He meets a girl called Estella who he soon befriends. They grow to like each other day by day. Soon it was time for Pip to fulfill his expectations.
Pip developed into a very rich person and with that he has a sense of power about him. As he is in a higher class, he has become blinded to who bought him there. He has a job which pays him quite a lot. Pip shortly becomes too rich for his own good. He forgets about who means to him the most. Dickens manipulated the reader through Pip’s journey by leading everyone to believe that Pip’s benefactor will be Mrs. Havisham. This attracted the reader to continue experiencing the feelings as Pip. Not before long we find out that Magwitch the convict was the actual benefactor.
In conclusion I feel that the opening chapter of ‘Great Expectations’ is effective because the main two characters who were included in the beginning were brought through right till the end. This showed that the emotional attachments weren’t lost. The method Dickens uses mot effectively is the where the reader is experiencing everything alongside Pip, so they are feeling what he must of felt. The theme of crime and law continues throughout the novel so the reader persists on reading.
