Magwitch’s sudden appearance startles pip. ‘Hold your noise cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves’ ‘keep still you little devil or ill cut your throat!’ This would have startled pip because Magwitch who is a intimidating man, suddenly appears shouting and threatening to kill him. As well as his sudden appearance dickens gives him short aggressive sentences such as, ‘tell us your name! Quick.’ which makes him sound even more threatening. Magwitch uses expressions like ‘give it mouth’ and ‘pint out the place’, to a Victorian reader that would appear common, indecent and not from a very well to do background. Magwitch threatens pip further when he says ‘what fat cheeks you ha got’ and ‘darn me if i couldn’t eat them’ this would have petrified pip even more, so it would be easier to manipulate him for the things that Magwitch wanted.
Pip is the complete opposite to Magwitch; this comes through in the way that he speaks and his mannerisms. When Magwitch threatens to ‘cut his throat’ he still remains polite by calling Magwitch ‘sir’ even though he does not know if he is going to kill him or not. As well as then, when Magwitch tilts him backwards over the gravestone he still uses Standard English and is polite, this shows us that in the Victorian day children were expected to be polite to any adult. Not only his accent but he also has to repeat himself such as when he says ‘pip, sir. Pip. Pip, sir’ this suggest that he is very quiet, probably because of how scared he is of Magwitch.
Magwitch is a bully in the way that he treats pip. Magwitch ‘turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets,’ this would terrify pip even more because it shows that Magwitch is a lot stronger than him. Pip doesn’t stand up to Magwitch, and he is very scared when he grabs him. Dickens shows this by the phrases he uses; pip ‘was seated on a high gravestone, trembling’. The word trembling makes us realise how scared he is if he is shaking in fear. Magwitch makes Pip feel helpless and not in control of the situation by the positions that he puts him in, like when pip says ‘he took me by both arms and tilted me back as far as he could hold me’. This makes us feel that pip has no say in what happens and that Magwitch could overpower him to do anything. As well as that, another thing that pip says is ‘and mine looked most helplessly up on to his’ talking about his arms and body, when Pip say’s this it reinforces how little and weak he is compared to Magwitch .
Magwitch’s words and actions suggest that he is a terrible man, Dickens gives us some clues that he might not be what he appears to be. When Magwitch asks where Pip’s mother is Pip points behind Magwitch ‘he started, made a short run, stopped and looked over his shoulder’. What Magwitch didn’t realise is that pip was pointing at his mother’s gravestone, not his actual mother, this makes the audience smile which takes away an element of fear away from Magwitch. Another clue that dickens gives us is when Magwitch says ‘who d’ye live with. Supposing your kindly let to live.’ When he says this he pauses after asking him where he lived, this makes it sound as if he forgot to be scary, so he could manipulate pip for what he needs, because pip isn’t going to take him seriously if he isn’t scared of him.
Once Magwitch moves away from Pip, there is lots of evidence to show that Dickens wants us to feel some sympathy for him such as when he says, ‘He hugged his shuddering body in both his arms clasping himself- as if to hold himself together’ when dickens says this it makes us feel a bit sorry for Magwitch, even if he is a criminal he still must be cold, lonely and upset. As he picks his way over the graveyard, to Pip, he looks like he was trying to escape- ‘the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon hi ankle and pull him in.’ The image that this would set in the readers head would be frightening, so we immediately feel like Magwitch is the victim instead of the criminal. ‘He came to the Low Church wall, he got over it, like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff.’ This tells us that physically Magwitch is not in very good condition, which also makes the reader feel sorry for him because it is as if he is not cared for and that nobody wants to look after him.