Compare Chapter One of Great Expectations, in which Pip first meets

Compare Chapter One of Great Expectations, in which Pip first meets

the convict, with Chapter 39 when he returns.

Pip Pirrip is our main character of the story ‘Great Expectations’ by

Charles Dickens. From what we’ve read in chapter one, we have found

out that he is an orphan living in Kent with his older sister and her

husband, Joe Gargery. We are not sure about his age but we can guess

that he is around eight years old. He meets an escaped convict by the

name of Magwitch, who asks him to bring some food and a file so he can

escape from the shackles at his feet. Later in the book, Pip inherits

a lot of money and moves to London where he is educated and meets an

old friend. But one night an old stranger by whom he doesn’t recognise

confronts Pip. This person that Pip meets is the person that left him

the riches, by the name of Magwitch.

Dickens wants us to see Pip as an ordinary early One9th Century boy,

who was orphaned, “Phillip Pirrip, late of the parish, and also

Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried;’ and lives with his

sister. As we can tell from Pip, he is uneducated and very poor. Pip

is very kind and polite to the convict but doesn’t realise how much

trouble he could be in if the convict ever did anything to harm him.

From this we can tell that Pip is childish in a sense as he doesn’t

really know very much and also to the fact that he is very young. As a

young child, Pip is seen to be very vulnerable, innocent and possibly

physically yet emotionally weak. We can also tell that he is childish

in a sense because he looks at his parent’s gravestones and imagines

from their names what they would look like: “From the character and

turn of the inscription Georgiana Wife of the Above I dr...

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...er One and now in chapter 39. In a previous

chapter, we see how Pip talks to Mr Joe Gargery. He is very rude also

to Magwitch, who at first seems to be a stranger, but as we saw in

chapter One, Pip was so polite to the convict, even though he did not

know who the mysterious character was.

Dickens was a social antic: he did not like the way society was run in

the Nineteenth Century. He writes about how convicts were unfairly

treated by being sent away to Australia and made to work in the awful

and blistering heat. We can tell this because Magwitch has come back “browned

and hardened by exposure to weather”. Also the rich were separated

from the poor. The rich were treated with a lot of respect, where as

the poor were seen as ‘filth’ and did not belong in society. Poor

people were not given a chance by society and had to live in extremely

poor conditions.