The setting in the first extract creates a very dreary and unfriendly atmosphere: ‘...dark flat wilderness...’, ‘The marshes were just a long black horizontal line...and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed.’ This setting gives the reader a feeling of unease. When the reader is first introduced to Miss Havisham’s room in extract two: ‘No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it.’ Dickens uses strong imagery to describe Miss Havisham's house as barren of feelings or even life, the reader comes to the conclusion that the person who lives in the abode must be devoid of feeling. From the setting we can tell that ‘Great Expectations’ is a dark and gloomy book.
Dickens uses vocabulary that makes the reader able to build an excellent picture. He writes that the wind comes from a ‘savage lair’ which gives us the impression of a wild beast and personifies the wind. When he’s describing what’s happened to Magwitch he uses lots of strong words: ‘soaked, smothered, lamed, stung, torn, limped, glared, growled.’ We can imagine a wet limping angry man from the words used to describe him. When Estella makes Pip ashamed of himself his boots become ‘vulgar’. We feel his loathing that he doesn’t have anything better from the use of that word. Dickens’s choice of words also shows the reader that he wrote the book in Victorian times. He uses language such as ‘wittles’ (victuals) which is a word that has been all but eradicated from modern terminology.
Dickens uses a variety of sentences to create different effects. He uses long sentences with lots of commas and semi-colons to emphasise a point: ‘...dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried...’ This sentence makes the list of names seem very long and the reader feels for the little children that didn’t make it. Dickens has managed to give the ‘stone lozenges’ characters and show that they were individuals in just one sentence. He uses short sentences such as: ‘I pleaded in terror’ to make a sharp point. In that example we feel young Pip’s terror. He uses the repetition of the short sentence: ‘he titled me again’ very well to build tension and fear.
Pip is charming and polite right from the start of the book. He is very courteous even in the presence of unkindness. When Magwitch is tormenting him in the first extract he says in the most civil way: “If you would kindly let me keep upright sir, perhaps I shouldn’t be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.” He tackles this situation in such a grown up manner that Magwitch thinks that he is being cheeky. In the second extract, Pip’s first experience of a ‘higher class’ isn’t very pleasant. Miss Havisham treats him as a play thing and Estella is particularly cruel to him: “...Why, he is a common labouring-boy!” But he doesn’t lose his conduct and treats her in the kindest manner, even calling her “miss”.
Many orphans and misfortunate children in Victorian England were homeless and living on the streets. The only other options for them were charity schools, and these were terrible places for children to be as they were often beaten, used as slaves and treated very terribly. If children weren’t ‘lucky’ enough to go to charity schools, they had to work to make ends meet from a very young age; these jobs were usually unpleasant and sometimes dangerous. Luckily for Pip, even though he is an orphan he hasn’t had to go through the worst that could have happened to him and this might have something to do with why he’s such a pleasant person.
Dickens, in the second extract shows the reader the obvious difference between the rich and poor in Victorian times. Pip is left humiliated, embarrassed and understandably angry after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella. Torn between being insulted and his attraction to Estella, he feels ashamed of his upbringing, so much so that he ‘wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up.’ His new found respect and love for Joe is being spoiled by his embarrassment of being brought up in a lower class family.
Magwitch is introduced to us as ‘a fearful man’ with his first words being: “Hold your noise...Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!” but this cowardly act of his shows the reader that Magwitch is not as tough as he comes across even though Pip still finds him terrifying. Magwitch is a very complicated character; one minute we hate him, the next we think he’s pathetic, the next we feel incredible sympathy for him. These sort of strong reactions are typical throughout the book and our feelings for the characters are always changing.
There are splashes of humour every now and then in the midst of all the doom and gloom of the book. When Magwitch asks Pip where his mother is and Pip points to an area nearby, Magwitch turns around and is about to make a run for it when he realises that Pip is pointing at a grave. “And is that your father alonger with your mother?” he asks to make sure that Pip is alone.
We can tell that Magwitch has been through a lot from his appearance. He attacks a piece of bread from Pip’s pocket and eats it ‘ravenously’, even after it had been on the floor. Magwitch even goes as far as inventing a young man who will tear Pip’s liver out if he doesn’t bring him food and a file. It’s as if he doesn’t think he’s threatening enough, he needs a younger scarier man to do that for him. As Magwitch is about to go away and looks at the cold wet land around he says: “I wish I was a frog. Or a eel.” The reader begins to feel sorry for Magwitch even more so when he hugs himself ‘...as if to hold himself together’ and limps away over the nettles and brambles. Dickens through Magwitch shows the reader that convicts are people. They still feel the cold and wet, they feel hunger. The fact that Dickens’s father was put in the debtor’s prison made him able to understand ‘criminals’ more than the average person and see that they weren’t all bad people, and he wanted more people to have this opinion.
Pip thinks that Magwitch looks as though he is ‘eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.’ There is a gibbet where a pirate had once been buried in the marshes and Pip looks at Magwitch ‘...as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again.’ Dickens makes the reader wonder if that is how Magwitch is going to meet his end. The descriptions from Pip are very eloquent and show us that he has a wonderful imagination.
In Dickens’s time, criminals (and a person could be called this just for stealing a loaf of bread for his/her family, or committing some sort of petty crime) were thrown into prison or put in hulks. Hulks were old naval ships that had been converted into prisons; the convicts were shackled so that there was less chance of escaping. If a person escaped from a hulk s/he was transported to Australian on a ship that had atrocious living conditions, many people dies from disease or malnutrition before they arrive din Australia. People were thrown into the debtor’s prison when they got into any debt, even if they only owed a little bit of money. The person in debt was imprisoned indefinitely until the person who they owed the money was satisfied. Many debtors died in these prisons because of the terrible living conditions. This is extremely different to how it is now, and so the modern reader doesn’t understand the situation. Today almost everyone is in some sort of debt; mortgages, loans, overdrafts, and yet no one is thrown into prison for it.
Magwitch speaks as though he’s not very educated. He says “wittles” when he means ‘victuals’, “partickler” instead of ‘particular’ and “percooliar” when he should say ‘peculiar’. Dickens uses phonetics to show his dialect and colloquialisms. This makes Magwitch seem not very sophisticated. The ‘younger’ Pip’s dialogue shows that he has had some sort of education as it’s a lot more educated than Magwitch’s: “If you would kindly please to let me keep upright, sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick”. But when compared to the ‘older’ Pip’s dialogue, we can see that he became more educated: “It was a dressing-room…and prominent in it was a draped table with a gilded looking-glass.” Miss Havisham and Estella seem to speak ‘posh’ and rather snobby. When they are playing cards Estella says: “He calls the knaves Jacks!” She obviously thinks that her way of talking is proper. Dickens shows the reader how the different classes spoke in Victorian times; from the poor and uneducated (Magwitch) to the wealthy and refined (Miss Havisham).
We don’t see much of Estella and Dickens leaves the reader asking questions; who is the young and pretty girl and what is she doing in such a morbid place? But what we do see isn’t very nice. Although she is a beautiful girl she is very vindictive. “…what coarse hands he has. And what thick boots!” She makes Pip feel ashamed of himself and doesn’t even say his name; she talks as if she is speaking about him to someone else, as if she could never lower her standards enough to talk to such a common ‘thing’. ‘She put the mug down and on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace.’ She isn’t satisfied until she makes Pip ‘lean against the wall and cry’ and watched him twist his hair with bitter frustrations.
Miss Havisham is unusual because although aged, she is not married. In Dickens’s England a woman was expected to get married and then look after her husband and children for the rest of her life. This was necessary because women relied on their fathers, then their husbands. Without a husband how would a woman survive if her father died? Or ran into debt? This is another situation were that the modern reader finds unusual. These days, women have equal rights and do not need to get married.
Dickens makes us feel some kind of consideration for Miss Havisham during our first meeting with her: ‘…The bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers…’ She seems like an injured soul and we comprehend why when she says her heart is “broken!” The reader wonders how come Miss Havisham is in her unmarried state and this makes us feel sorry for her. She lives in the dark, keeping all the light out as if she can’t bear to face the world. Then the reader’s attitude towards her changes when we realise that Miss Havisham just wants Pip for a plaything and we begin to feel less kind towards her. When she goes as far as telling Estella to “beggar him” and “break his heart” we definitely we definitely start to dislike her. The reader doesn’t feel that Pip is safe with her.
The differences between the happenings now and in ‘Great Expectations’ make the modern reader surprised and mystified, but still able to relate to Pip’s story. ‘Great Expectations’ is can still be related to today because at some point, everyone goes through the struggles that Pip must battle. It shows that assets and wealth do not change who people are inside, and that finding one’s self can be a long tedious process until finally everything becomes clear.
Dickens wrote ‘Great Expectations’ as a way for him to introduce himself into his writing; many aspects of his life can be found in the book, making it very autobiographical. It was also a way of making his feelings known about the social issues in England in his time. He tells the reader not to judge people, as appearances are very deceptive. The ‘moral’ of the story seems to be that no matter how you change your outward appearance and how much you educate yourself, you can’t change who you really are.
