Influential Characters Around Pip

Book ... Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Analysis ... Influential Characters Around Pip

The novel Great Expectations was written by Charles Dickens who although being a promising writer had an unpromising childhood. His parents, even before he was born, found it hard to make ends meet and the whole family had a hard life. Further devastation occurred when Charles’ father was sent to prison for massive debts. Charles, a mere child, was taken out of school and sent to work. After his father was released and wished that Charles be sent back to school, his mother declined the suggestion and this might have been the greatest wound in Charles’ life. From the experience of these hardships and short childhood, grew a writer whose published works touched the hearts of many.

Great Expectations is a narration by a young lad named Pip and the first chapter opens with him telling us about the family he really belonged to - his parents and his five brothers who are all dead and buried in the churchyard. It is while he is visiting their graves one day that he meets a man he comes to fear the very instant Pip sets his eyes on him. Pip does not know that this man is a n escaped convict. But Pip does know that he is strong and is capable of carrying out the threats he has issued to Pip. Young Pip is to tell no one about the man in the marshes and needs to assist the man by bringing him food and a metal file to break his prison chains. Pip’s fear is obvious when he thinks that this man is capable of murder and the convict does nothing to ease Pip’s fear but merely worsens it when he turns Pip upside down. “His eyes looked powerfully into mine; and mine looked helplessly up at his.”

Pip scuttles home as soon as he is let go, promising the convict assistance and secrecy of it. Upon Pip’s return home, we are introduced to Mrs. Joe Gargery and Joe.

Mrs. Joe Gargery is Pip’s sister who has brought Pip up “by hand”. To a reader, we simply understand that she was solely...