Phillip Pirrip is a poor boy from a poor family. His parents are dead, and he is being “brought up by hand” by his scold of a sister, and her husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. He is a self-conscious, uncertain young boy, and his innocence is broken by two events that thrust him into the world outside of Joe’s forge and change the course of his life. Great Expectations Charles Dickens Penguin English Library In the opening chapter the six-year old Pip recounts “his first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things”. On the marsh land near the forge he runs into an escaped convict, Abel Magwitch, who threatens his life and intimidates him into stealing wittles (i.e. food) as well as a file to cut his chains. It is a dramatic, …show more content…
In this he learns what it means to lie. Magwitch is captured, and the theft from the forge blamed on him. Pip escapes a whipping from his sister, who suspects that he is behind it all. Through the intervention of the pompous windbag Mr Pumblechook, Pip is then sent to Satis House to attend to Miss Havisham, who is surely one of Dickens’ most compelling characters. Miss Havisham was left at the altar many years before, and spends her days in the room prepared for the guests, now thoroughly dishevelled, still wearing her wedding dress. She has a ward, Estella, who is Pip’s age, and that is the reason Pip is there. Miss Havisham is fashioning Estella into an instrument of revenge, a woman who will break men’s hearts; thus she teaches Pip what it means to yearn for love and, in turn, for social position. Pip, nevertheless, thinks that it is he who is being groomed. When he is almost of age and comes into money from a mysterious benefactor he naturally assumes that it is the work of Miss Havisham. And at this point he is hopelessly and blindly in love with Estella. Yet it’s a game for Miss Havisham as she plays out an act of revenge on the lover who abandoned her at the