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As an infant, Philip Pirrip was unable to pronounce either his first name or his last; doing his best, he called himself “Pip,” and the name stuck. Now Pip, a young boy, is an orphan living in his sister’s house in the marsh country in southeast England.
One evening, Pip sits in the isolated village churchyard, staring at his parents’ tombstones. Suddenly, a horrific man, growling, dressed in rags, and with his leg in chains, springs out from behind the gravestones and seizes Pip. This escaped convict questions Pip harshly and demands that Pip bring him food and a file with which he can saw off his leg irons.
Frightened into obedience, Pip runs to the house he shares with his overbearing sister and her kindly husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. The boy stashes some bread and butter in one leg of his pants, but he is unable to get away quickly. It is Christmas Eve, and Pip is forced to stir the holiday pudding all evening. His sister, whom Pip calls Mrs. Joe, thunders about. She threatens Pip and Joe with her cane, which she has named Tickler, and with a foul-tasting concoction called tar-water. Very early the next morning, Pip sneaks down to the pantry, where he steals some brandy (mistakenly refilling the bottle with tar-water, though we do not learn this until Chapter
Unfortunately, the first man he finds hiding in the marshes is actually a second, different convict, who tries to strike Pip and then flees. When Pip finally comes upon his original tormentor, he finds him suffering, cold, wet, and hungry. Pip is kind to the man, but the convict becomes violent again when Pip mentions the other escapee he encountered in the marsh, as though the news troubles him greatly. As the convict scrapes at his leg irons with the file, Pip slips away through the mists and returns home.
The first chapters of Great Expectations set the plot in motion while introducing Pip and his world. As both narrator and protagonist, Pip is naturally the most important character in Great Expectations: the novel is his story, told in his words, and his perceptions utterly define the events and characters of the book. As a result, Dickens’s most important task as a writer in Great Expectations is the creation of Pip’s character. Because Pip’s is the voice with which he tells his story, Dickens must make his voice believably human while also ensuring that it conveys all the information necessary to the plot. In this first section, Pip is a young child, and Dickens masterfully uses Pip’s narration to evoke the feelings and problems of childhood. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, Pip is looking at his parents’ gravestones, a solemn scene which Dickens renders comical by having Pip ponder the exact inscriptions on the tombstones. When the convict questions him about his parents’ names, Pip recites them exactly as they appear on the tombstones, indicating his youthful innocence while simultaneously allowing Dickens to lessen the dramatic tension of the novel’s opening.
Read more about the first-person point of view.
As befits a well-meaning child whose moral reasoning is unsophisticated, Pip is horrified by the convict. But despite his horror, he treats him with compassion and kindness. It would have been easy for Pip to run to Joe or to the police for help rather than stealing the food and the file, but Pip honors his promise to the suffering man—and when he learns that the police are searching for him, he even worries for his safety. Still, throughout this section, Pip’s self-commentary mostly emphasizes his negative qualities: his dishonesty and his guilt. This is characteristic of Pip as a narrator throughout Great Expectations. Despite his many admirable qualities—the strongest of which are compassion, loyalty, and conscience—Pip constantly focuses on his failures and shortcomings. To understand him as a character, it is necessary to look beyond his self-descriptions and consider his actions. In fact, it may be his powerful sense of his own moral shortcomings that motivates Pip to act so morally. As the novel progresses, the theme of self-improvement, particularly economic and social self-improvement, will become central to the story. In that sense, Pip’s deep-seated sense of moral obligation, which is first exhibited in this section, works as a kind of psychological counterpart to the novel’s theme of social advancement.
Read more about ambition and self-improvement as themes.
Pip’s surroundings—in this section, the “shrouded” marshes of Kent and the oppressive bustle of Mrs. Joe’s house—are also important to the novel. Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens uses setting to create a dramatic atmosphere: the setting of the book always sets the tone for the action and reinforces Pip’s perception of his situation. When the weather is dark and stormy, trouble is usually brewing, and when Pip goes alone into the mist-shrouded marsh, danger and ambiguity usually await. In this section, Pip’s story shifts rapidly between dramatic scenes with the convict on the marshes and comical scenes under Mrs. Joe’s thumb at home. Despite Mrs. Joe’s rough treatment of Pip, which she calls bringing him up “by hand,” the comedy that pervades her household in Chapter
Read more about the marshes as a symbol.
In terms of narrative, the introduction of the convict is the most important occurrence in the plot of the first section. Though Pip believes that the convict’s appearance in his life is an isolated incident, he will feel this character’s influence in many ways throughout the novel. The convict will later reappear as the grim Magwitch, Pip’s secret benefactor and the chief architect of his “great expectations.” Though Dickens gives us no indication of the man’s future in Pip’s life, he does create the sense that the convict will return, largely by building a sense of mystery around the man’s situation and around his relationship to the second convict Pip encounters in the marsh.
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