Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens Chapter 1

Chapter One
In which we meet Pip, and Pip meets a terrifying man in the graveyard.

• Introducing Pip: "My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip." Oh, Chas. You do love the alliterative names, don't you?
• It's only the second paragraph, and I'm already giggling aloud. Which, yes, makes me a huge nerd, but also makes me exceedingly happy. (Also, it might make me slightly twisted, as the paragraph is all about Pip's dead family members.)
• Introducing An Escaped Convict (I'm making an educated guess due to the leg iron) in the Graveyard: "A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin." Shades of Black Jack!
• So, after confiscating Pip's snack—by shaking him upside-down by his ankle until the bread falls out of his pocket—the convict puts a few questions to Pip. When he finds out that Pip lives with his sister, Mrs. Joe Gargary—and it's always her full name—who's married to the blacksmith, he sends Pip off for a file and some "wittles".
• And just in case you're thinking, "Oh, right. Like anyone would go BACK to the graveyard after all that," the convict not only threatens that "...your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted, and ate," but also that if anything goes awry, he'll sic someone else—someone who makes this terrifying man look like "a Angel"—on Pip, and delivers this totally blood-curdling line: "A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open." GAH.
• That said, even though the convict is way stronger than Pip, it's clear that he's in terrible physical shape: "As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were 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." Man, Dickens really kills at the spooky imagery.
  

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Index.

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Author page.

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Amazon.

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Book source: Review copy from the publisher.

Comments

[Maureen E]

I read this for a college course, so my comments are likely to be all lit theory-ish. But I do think that Pip is a very unreliable narrator and that the opening, where he talks about naming himself, and also the theories that he spawns from his parents' gravestones. Sure it's possible that what he thinks is true, but there's no real reason to think that it is, aside from the fact that Pip's the narrator.

In short: Oh, Dickens, you sly dog, you.

[Leila]

I could definitely buy that, even only having read the first chapter so far: his description of his imaginings of his dead family sounded more like a storyteller (in this case, Pip) adding color to his story than something that is fully, completely believable.

[looloolooweez]

I love this and I'm inspired to tackle some of these dusty, neglected classics on the top shelf of my bookcase. We read Great Expectations in middle school... I vaguely remember being fascinated by Miss Havisham but mostly I was reading some sort of YA fantasy under the desk instead. Maybe this is a good New Year's resolution?

[Lindsey Carmichael]

Read this in high school and still remember the line about "overcoming the uncomfortable habit of living." Snorting with laughter in the middle of the lunch room is not good for your cool factor.