How old is pip in great expectations

Then, according to the book, he first visits Miss Havisham a year later. Here he meets Estella, who Pip thinks is about his own age, although she seems older. The way she talks about the brewery and what 'satis' means makes her sound older than nine. Pip seems somewhat older too.

For example, he uses the word melancholy instead of sad. I would say they were both at least eleven. In most films and TV series, the young Estella looks about thirteen. Reading the book I imagined her being prepubescent, although Pip does say that one of the reasons she appeared older was that she was a girl. I am sure the book says he only visited the house for about ten months before he was apprenticed to Joe.

Apprenticeships usually started at about age fourteen, so some more years seem to have disappeared from Pip's childhood. Pip learns of his Great Expectations four years later, when he would be eighteen. This just about gives Magwitch time to be transported to Australia, serve his seven years forced labour and to start making lots of money.

I also wondered about the ages of the older characters. Magwitch was described as about sixty when he comes back to see Pip, and he is still quite an active man. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Who are Estella's parents?

Why does Pip become ashamed of Joe? How does Miss Havisham feel about her behavior at the end of her life? At the end of this volume, Pip is 23, has contracted debts, and does not really know where to go.

His future feels stalled, blocked, to him. We enter March only a while later It is a pause, but a very dramatic and exciting one: the escape might be compromised if Pip is not able to row down the river at the planned time — is there enough time left to put the escape plan into practice?

Which was, I suppose, as false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards. The end of the chapter also anticipates the plot twist two chapters later, when Pip discovers that Miss Havisham is not, in fact, his benefactor, and that it was never intended that he should marry Estella.

Lots of hindsight go into his description of his relationships with the characters and with himself. This allows the reader to gradually put everything together.

A narrative could have been rather sentimental, which Dickens wanted to avoid. Dickens skillfully catches the reader's attention and sympathy in the first few pages, introduces several major themes, creates a mood of mystery in a lonely setting, and gets the plot moving immediately. George Gissing asks the reader to "Observe how finely the narrative is kept in one key. It begins with a mournful impression—the foggy marshes spreading drearily by the seaward Thames—and throughout recurs this effect of cold and damp and dreariness; in that kind Dickens never did anything so good.