WE see evidence of Miss Havisham’s life standing still when Dickens wrote ‘Her watch stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty to nine’. There is repetition of Miss Havisham being described as sour. This is for extra effect in getting the message through. Dickens put ‘in a by-yard there was a wilderness of empty casks, which had a certain sour remembrance of better days lingering about them, but it was too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that was gone’. Here is two references linking to Miss Havisham’s life turning sour, Dickens greatest novel.
The chapter ended with Dickens writing ‘That I was much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night and generally that I was in a low-lived, bad way’. This is the first time we see Pips attitudes changing. He now sees himself as lower class but know he feels he should be and he wants to be better. Before Pip leaves to go to London he says ‘And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me’. This is patheticfallacy on Pips life as everything in his way has gone so now he can go forward and see what is out there for himself.
Once Pip arrives in London he is not that impressed with it and Mr Jaggers. Before he’d even been into Mr Jagger’s office there are negative things about Jaggers. The coachman say’s to pip ‘then it must be a shilling’. ‘I don’t want to get into trouble know him’. After this Dickens wrote ‘When he had got his shilling and had course of time completed the ascent to his box and had got away (which appeared to relive his mind)’. This shows that people are scared of Jaggers and people aren’t scared of good people so this is a clue to what Pip is about to discover.
Once Pip enters Mr Jagger’s office Mike is sent out. This shows me that Pip is treated as upper class and with respect whereas before he wasn’t. He is also now addressed Mr Pip when before he was addressed ‘boy’. Mr Jagger’s room was described ‘by a skylight only, and was a most dismal place, the skylight, eccentrically pitched like a broken head and the distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had twisted themselves to peep down at me through it’. Its describes as ‘Most dismal’ this was not what Pip had been expecting. It is in contrast to what he was expecting.
The room was very dark and lit only by skylight. This links to miss havisham who also lived only in natural light, this represents the morale darkness in which both live their lives in. The words ‘broken head’ signify Miss Joe whose head was effectively broken after being attacked by Orlick. The line ‘to peep down at me through it’ shows us that Pip realises the importance of Jaggers and he feels that he is a no one in comparison to him. It was also written that ‘there were not so many papers about as I should have expected to see’.
Pip is beginning to realise that not everything is above board and legal. Also ‘ there were some odd objects about that I should not have expected to see – such as an old, rusty pistol, a sword in a scabbard, several strange looking boxes and packages and dreadful casts on a shelf, of faces particularly swollen and twitchy about the nose’. Dickens uses similes and personification in this line to give the objects a bad image e. g. strange looking boxes and dreadful casts… twitchy about the nose. Also some of the items are linked to death and violence (guns and swords).
