The setting in the first few paragraphs also tells us a bit more about Pip. Pip was in a “bleak place overgrown with nettles”, which shows us that he is not well cared for. The message that Pip is vulnerable stays with the nettles, as someone like Pip could easily fall in the overgrown nettles. It may well be also a clue. Imagine the overgrown nettles as the busy city of London, and Pip is the little seed amongst all the chaos. It's saying that if Pip wasn't careful, he may well be engulfed by the troublesome city.
Pip was the first character we came across, then out of the blue there comes the escaped convict, Magwitch. The readers' initial impression of Magwitch would be a frightening creature. From the description of Magwitch, we get the impression that he is like a person who can be seem as a different thing or person as Pip described him in different angles. At first we see him as the ghostly pirate. Dressed “all in coarse grey” and “with a great iron on his leg” plus he appeared out of nowhere. The fact that they were in a church yard makes Magwitch look more creepy. Even the weather is a cold, eerie feeling. Then Dickens made Magwitch almost an animal by using words such as “glared” and “growled”. “Licking his lips”, Magwitch said “You young dog, what fat cheeks you have got”. He was so hungry that he wanted to eat Pip! What he said also reminds readers of the well known wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.
Dickens showed the two sides of Magwitch in this opening chapter: the evil, vicious wolf and the vulnerable, lonely convict. By describing Magwitch's appearance as as a convict had already created an image that Magwitch is evil and had put his place to the bottom of the social class. It wasn't the best of first impressions, but towards the end of the chapter Magwitch begins to soften, until he was seen as small and weak when he was walking towards the beacon and the gibbet. These two random objects tells us that he is an ambivalent character, like so many other people.
It's important for Dickens to present Magwitch as an ambivalent character at this stage because he want the readers to know how complex a person can be and that we must not set our minds about Magwitch until we've seen him from different angles. Once people see one side of a person, it's very difficult to look at them in a different way, so Magwitch have to be presented early in the story. Dickens also want the readers to be prepared for events later on, when we see Magwitch from a good side, so that we can understand him better.
Magwitch compared with Pip is like the predator and its prey. The hungry, angry, dirty wolf and a helpless seed who is far too innocent to run away. But in a way, they're very similar to each other. In the first few paragraphs we see the stuck up, haughty Pip who is so bitter about his past that he made jokes of it to cover up. Then we see Pip really as a little Pip compared to Magwitch. We see Magwitch as a villain when he's with Pip, but we also see the Pip-like side of him when he's alone, walking towards no where.
In amidst all this clustered events, Magwitch did take pity on Pip. Just for a moment when Pip told him that his parents are dead. But we don't find out the reason why Magwitch took pity on Pip until near the end of the novel. Magwitch took pity because Pip brought back memories of his own. Magwitch remembers that he had a daughter that he lost, so he can understand when you loose someone close. But thinking that she's dead anyway, Magwitch went back to the cold-blooded wolf.
In this chapter the settings were the marshes. This gave a feeling of gloominess and emptiness. In accompany to this there was the “raw” weather. Next to the marshes was the “bleak” church yard, “overgrown with nettles”. The tombstones had seen their better days and would probably have green moss creeping over the letters. This setting would make people shudder, whether it's the cold weather or the church yard, there's definitely an eerie feeling hanging in the air.
Dickens used a lot of symbolism in this story. A couple of objects were used as symbols of future events. For example the sailors' beacon and the gibbet. The beacon gives out light and we know that light is life. It's representing Magwitch giving Pip a new life later on in the story. However, being a story things can't always go smoothly. The gibbet's presence had dimmed the beacon's effects. The gibbet reminds us that however good Magwitch might get, the fact that he has done something wrong to become a prisoner in the first place remains. Magwitch was “limping towards this latter”, as if limping helplessly towards his future, to his death. We were also warned about Magwitch's future by the colours of the sky and views further along. “Angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed” was a warning of danger, and that someone's life, possibly Magwitch's, may be threatened.
Other symbols such as tombstones and the church itself was not there by accident either. Magwitch had put Pip on his parents' tombstone and looked into Pip's eyes. It's as if Magwitch's promising Pip's parents that he will look after Pip. If we look at it this way, we get the feeling that they're more like a mother telling the baby chick the ways of life rather than a merciless wolf and its prey.
The story was set in the Industrial Revolution and Pip is a perfect example of what people had wanted then. Pip was born in the countryside like many people, so wanting to go to the big cities comes naturally. Pip did not hesitate when he was offered the chance to become a gentleman, the sole reason being to impress Estella. But however good it may be, Pip turned extremely haughty and forgot how he came to be who he is now. In the end Pip was back to countryside, trying to find that clean innocence again after realising that your status isn't everything.
The relationship between the city and the countryside is really just one big circle. You start out small, then you move into the city where you learn about the ways of things. Then the pressure gets to people and they realise that maybe the roots are better after all. But all the big cities are really just really big villages, so there is no difference at all. What made them so different from each other was how people thought and the barrier of the social classes. Who knows what would have happened if Pip didn't meet Estella and felt bad about his background. But Pip would have gone to the city in one way or the other, influenced by doings of so many other people.
The readers of this story would agree very much with the setting. The readers were mostly of middle class and up, so they would have been in the cities. They know what it's like to be in the cities and for some of them they would feel as if the story was based on them. Even the gloomy settings of the countryside wouldn't put them off, as it's anything to escape the densely packed cities.
I think Dickens definitely have a romantic view of nature in Great Expectations. But his views are not just one sided because he didn't go on and on about how good the countrysides are. He looked at why people would want to go to cities and brought out all the good points of the cities. Then he explored how people becomes tired of the city lives and brought out the good points of the countryside. Generally though, his views were more on the romantic side as his writing reminds us all the way through that the countryside stays innocent, pure and freedom is everywhere.
Our impressions of Pip, Magwitch and the marshes were shaped by Dickens' use of symbolic language. He used symbols of things that Victorians knew and built vivid images in readers minds. Dickens had also used lots of hidden metaphors, which doesn't have the usual 'as if'. Based on our first impressions of Pip, Magwitch and the marshes, this remains a very memorable opening chapter in literary history because it created a very realistic scene. The readers would not be reading it, they would be seeing the story. It's also because of Dickens' clever use of symbolism and dropping clues about the future, which keeps the readers guessing. The chapter just make the story a whole lot more interesting.