Pip’s first meeting with Magwitch is very dramatic, and very well written by Dickens. In the paragraph just before the first dialect exchanged between Pip and Magwitch, Dickens switched his narrative style, from 1st person to 3rd. There is proof of this: “and that small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.” This an adventurous technique and it pays off. The reader engages in the vivid descriptions and pictures of the setting that Dickens is trying to describe, which in my opinion is a tranquil and peaceful church courtyard, but the weather is very bad, there is a howling wind and it’s a bit stormy; (this can reflect Pip’s emotions at the time, he’s a peaceful boy but really he has a storm brewing underneath) however, the whole flow of the story is torn apart when Pip is disturbed by a man who we later find out is Magwitch. At this time in the story Dickens uses dialogue to move the plot of the story on.
In the dialogue exchanged between Pip and Magwitch the reader learns more about the character we already know (Pip), and although we don’t know much about this new character (Magwitch), we want to know more so we keep reading. This meeting has created good drama and helps show how the rest of the story is going to be set out. We learn that Pip is a very polite, well mannered boy. Even though he has just been viciously threatened by a man he has never seen before in his life, he still calls him ‘sir’. This again shows how life has changed since the 19th century. Back in the 19th century everybody was polite and children respected their elders. Children were meant to be seen and not heard. Nowadays, unless you are very weak and scared, if somebody grabs you and threatened you you don’t call them sir and treat them as if they are a better person than you. Even when children talk to their elders they do not call them ‘sir’ anymore.
Dickens’ sense of humour is shown again in Pip’s meeting with Magwitch. When Magwitch asks Pip where his mother is, and Pip says “there, sir” Dickens writes “he started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.” Again this is not funny at first, but if you are reading and examining the story closely and you imagine what Magwitch is doing, you can imagine that he thinks Pip’s mother is behind him so he turns round, goes to run to her but doesn’t see her, and is looking around, probably a bit confused and dumbfounded. This is another clever technique used by Dickens because it lifts the mood of the reader, after an intense meeting with Magwitch.
Dickens uses a wide variety of sentence lengths up to this point. A long sentence can be found on page five, the last paragraph, from the end of the fourth line “At such a time” until the end of this paragraph on page six. This is an exceptionally long sentence. It is eleven lines long, there are a lot of commas, and it has five semi-colons in it, to help break the sentence up. This is a very descriptive sentence in which we find out the names of all of Pip’s dead relatives, and we learn where Pip lives. There is a short sentence on page seven, the third paragraph from bottom. This whole paragraph is full of short sentences, the shortest being “He tilted me again.” These short sentences add suspense to the story at the time when Pip is being threatened by Magwitch. This paragraph is very effective at giving you the impression that the convict is powerful and scary.
Magwitch is described as “A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head.” This makes Magwitch seem very mysterious, and Pip is obviously scared of him. Dickens is giving us Pip’s impression of Magwitch by breaking the ‘sentence rules’ and using non-verbal sentences and a lot of ‘and’s. This helps make the sentences flow quicker, and creates suspense. Dickens also uses lots of adjectives and adverbs in this first description of Magwitch, which is good descriptive detail.
Through dialogue and excellent description we get the impression that Magwitch is an evil, strong and potentially a murderer. The threat he gives to Pip is very visual, and has many morbid references towards Pip’s liver.
The setting and atmosphere at the time of Magwitch’s attack reflects Magwitch’s threatening manner. By using vivid descriptions such as “the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed” Dickens creates a morbid atmosphere that matches Magwitch’s angry attack on Pip.
When Magwitch first meets Pip he is very rough with him, and viciously attacks him. He threatens him and he uses menacing, cruel words. By the time Pip meets Magwitch when he is 23 he has turned into a fine gentleman, and he didn’t remember Magwitch at first. However, by this meeting there is a level of respect between the two characters and both of them communicate with each other. Pip must feel as though he owes Magwitch everything, because he was his benefactor. In an ironic twist to the story we find out that Magwitch is in fact Estella’s father and nobody knew this.
In chapter eight of the story, called “Play Begins”, Pip visits Satis House for the first time and meets Estella and Miss Havisham for the very first time. Ironically Satis House means Enough House, the owner of this house will have everything they want, and they could want nothing else. This is not the case with Miss Havisham, and at points in the story it is not true for Estella either.
Although Charles Dickens is writing the story in the first person, it is written almost as an account by Pip, where he is older. You can tell this by many of the words that he uses. A young boy wouldn’t know the definitions of some of these words and wouldn’t know how to use them e.g. Before Pip leaves with Mr. Pumblechook to go to Satis House he describes Mr. Pumblechook as “eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I may be allowed the expression) a gorging and gormandising manner.” This is an example of very advanced language that a boy of Pip’s age wouldn’t be able to use.
The first description Dickens writes of Satis House is again from Pip’s point of view as the story is written in the first person. The house was describes as “made from old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred.” This description tells the reader that the house is quite old, and has to be dark inside since some of the windows have been boarded up. The word ‘dismal’ shows that the house is miserable, gloomy and depressing. This is good use of language by Dickens; it is a simple yet powerful word.
When Pip first sees Estella he describes her as ‘very pretty, and seemed very proud.’ My class watched a film version of Great Expectations, and in the film Estella did seem very proud. She seemed to think of herself as superior, and I think she seemed a bit over-confident.
Estella called Pip ‘boy’ a lot. In the first conversation they had, when she explained the meaning of ‘Satis House’ she called him boy four times. To me this seems that she doesn’t respect Pip, and she looks down on him. Being the polite boy that Pip is he calls her ‘miss’. This is another sign that the book was written a long time ago. Back in the 19th century people had more respect for each other, but nowadays if a girl close to my own age started calling me ‘boy’ I would get offended, and wouldn’t be polite to her in the way that Pip is. I thought that this showed that Pip was a fragile, and had low confidence and self esteem. Could this be his sister’s fault?
In the film Estella looked a bit older than Pip, but there couldn’t have been a big age gap. Pip actually says “Though she called me ‘boy’ so often, and with a carelessness that was far from complimentary, she was of about my own age. She seemed much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed; and she was as scornful as me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen.” This shows that Pip doesn’t like her calling him ‘boy’, and he doesn’t see it as a compliment, but still he says nothing to her. Perhaps he is too shy? Or maybe he wants to be on his best behaviour so that he doesn’t disappoint his sister and Mr Pumblechook? This quotation also shows that Pip thinks Estella is self-possessed, in other words self-confident, and she was scornful to him, which in this case I think this means disrespectful, which is true.
Pip is then taken upstairs by Estella, and is left alone to enter the room where Miss Havisham is sitting. When he first sees Miss Havisham he describes her as “the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.” He is obviously thinking that she is an odd woman, and he has probably never met anybody out of the ordinary before. Pip later says “I should have cried out, if I could.” My interpretation of this is that Pip is scared of Miss Havisham, scared of the house he is in, and doesn’t know what to do. He wants to leave, but knows that he cannot disappoint his sister.
Estella is a young woman, and we know that she is about the same age as Pip. She is first described as a pretty girl, who seems very proud. We know in Chapter 8 that she lives with Miss Havisham, and at first I thought she was Miss Havisham’s maid. But later in chapter 8 we find out that she is in fact a much higher class child than Pip. This quote can prove this: “He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!” “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!” We later find out that Estella is the daughter of Magwitch, (the convict who attacked Pip, who is also Pip’s benefactor) and once her fiancé discovered this he no longer wanted to marry her, because she appeared lower class. This is very ironic. At first it is Pip that cannot get Estella because she is too ‘upper class’ for him. Then the situation reverses and it is Estella that cannot marry the person she wants to because she is not suitable. This is quite amusing.
Estella doesn’t treat Pip with any respect. She always calls him ‘boy’, and in my opinion this shows that although she is about the same age as him, she doesn’t consider him her equal. However, Pip is highly influenced by Estella. After she comments on his ‘coarse hands’ and ‘thick boots’ Pip is ashamed of his hands, and he later says that his hands and boots had never troubled him before, but they troubled him now, as vulgar appendages.
Estella is used by Miss Havisham, although she doesn’t know it. Miss Havisham is raising Estella to think of men as she now thinks of them, and makes her treat Pip horribly, so that she can break his heart. It is almost as if Miss Havisham wants to get revenge on the male gender by modelling and shaping the perfect heart-breaker; a pretty yet evil young woman. However she does change, and after everything she has been through she says to Pip in the final chapter of the novel “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching. . . . I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
At the start of chapter 8 we do no anything about Miss Havisham. But in this chapter we learn that she is an old woman, who doesn’t go out, and wears a bridal dress at home. All of her clothes have faded from white to yellow, and whenever she picks something up in her room, she puts it back down in exactly the same place. She doesn’t know what day of the week it is, and all of her clocks and watches have been stopped at twenty minutes to nine. I think this is because Miss Havisham was ‘jilted’ by Compeyson, and this ruined her wedding day, which is meant to be the best day of a woman’s life. I think Miss Havisham never got over this rejection, and it ruined her life. Therefore she wanted every day to be relived like the one that ruined her life. She didn’t want to live anymore, she had given up. Nowadays a failed marriage is not a big problem, it happens to many people, but back in the 19th century this would be a huge embarrassment, especially to someone of such a high class as Miss Havisham.
Miss Havisham again doesn’t treat Pip with any respect. She sees him as a target through which she can get revenge on the male gender. She is constantly breaking his heart, whether it is through Estella, or by leading Pip on and not telling him that she wasn’t his benefactor. She is a very commanding woman, and whenever she says anything to Pip or Estella they both respond quickly without questioning her requests too much, no matter how bizarre they are. This could be out of politeness towards Miss Havisham, or fear of her.
Over the course of the story the reader sees Pip growing up, and identifies with him, through many tough and dangerous times, both emotionally and physically. By the end of the story everybody Pip was close to has died except for Estella, and this leads the reader to believe that he will treat her like the queen he thought she was when he was younger. The reader finds it easy to sympathise with Pip, and there is great empathy for him because he is such a polite, amusing, quick-thinking character.
By Matt Capanna