Great Expectations: Chapter Analysis

The opening story begins on an afternoon towards evening, on Christmas Eve, when little Pip is visiting the graves of his parents and his five siblings. He was a baby when they died, so he has never known them and, as there were no photographs at that time, he tries to depict them with his fantasy. It is understood that the place overgrown with nettles is the churchyard where rest the late Philip and Georgiana Pirrip and their five infant sons: Alexander Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger. Beyond the churchyard lays the dark flat wilderness, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, the marshes and the low grayish line beyond, and the river that runs to the sea. A fugitive convict, Abel Magwitch, scares Pip into obedience to bring him next day, from home, food and a file to tear his shackles:
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around 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

He even expects to find a policeman, waiting for him in the house, but he just confronts his severe and bully sister, Georgiana, 20 years older than him and sits with his brother in law, Joe, who treats him kindly. Joe tells him about two fugitive prisoners wandering in the marshes. They have for dinner bread and butter, but Pip saves the food for the fugitive, together with a pork pie, especially made for Christmas dinner and some brandy from the brandy bottle which he replaces, instead of water, with tar-water. However, soldiers recapture the convict - in a manhunt, helped by the people they found in Joe’s house, including Joe and Pip - during a fight he was having with the other fugitive convict and return both of them to the prison ship, or to the Hulk, sailing on the