How does Dickens engage and entertain his audience in the opening chapters of

by his sister; Mrs. Joe Gargery. Pips life is very quiet due to losing five of his brothers, but still lives with his sister Mrs. Joe and the strange and uncaring Mrs. Joe Gargerry, she is a bitter and angry woman who brings up Pip "by hand”. She can also be quite aggressive and violent as she uses a cane on pip. Mrs. Joe Gargerry can in some ways be seen as uncaring towards pip in the way that she wore pins on her apron, a sign of unbecomingness and trying to keep him away. Even by the way she cuts bread we get a more personal view of her, mid-way through the second chapter it says “she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib” which shows she is frustrated. Women in Victorian times did not have any rights and so it is hard for Mrs. Joe to do what she wants, women were also not allowed to vote. Her husband, Mr. Joe Gargery, the blacksmith is pips adoptive father but Pip sees him as an extremely good friend. Joe is uneducated and sometimes a little slow but he understands the important things in life. Charles Dickens creates mood and atmosphere by using a technique called pafellic fallacy where the mood of the characters and surroundings reflect the weather. For example when it is a dark, misty, foggy and miserable day, he describes the characters to be boring, unhappy and dull, a similarity to the weather. The writer builds up tension by using shorter sentences, uses similes like “it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom”. Dickens also uses some metaphors like “as if some goblin had been crying” he does this for emphasis and gives the reader an image. The author frequently uses repetition to get a point across to you especially in chapter 3 where Dickens repeats words like damp, twig and bare. He even uses some rhyming to entertain the reader, at the start of the third paragraph he writes “I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying”, he uses this for emphisis and to keep the paragraph flowing. Dickens creates a narrator that tells the story through a child’s eyes. Dickens leaves you with several questions for you to make your mind up on like how will Pip react to the convict? Who is he, what if Mrs. Joe Gargery finds out? Will she notice what he had stolen? And how did the convict lose his leg? Charles Dickens does this to keep the reader interested and engaged into his novel and to keep them amused at some of the cheeky and occasionally outrageous things pip says and does. Dickens steps the story up a gear when pip takes the “whittles” and “file” to the convict when he finds he is not there, this leaves the reader in suspense and desperate to read onto the next chapter to find out whom the mysterious stranger is. The new convict was a lot younger but still wore the same rags and dirty hat as the previous unknown man. When pip went to the marsh pip was shocked to see he was not there and this left him into despair. This man is quite abrupt and aggressive, he also has an extremely short temper.                                                        At the end of the day Charles Dickens has to be one of the best authors in the world to date and this is undoubtedly one of his most famous and best books. He certainly achieves his goal of entertaining, and engaging us in the course of the first few chapters. After each paragraph he leaves us with yet another dilemma, with the reader anticipating the outcome of the problem.