How Does Magwitch Change During The Course Of The Novel

Great Expectations
Do our views of Magwitch change during the course of the novel?

Great Expectations is about an ordinary, working class boy who suddenly finds himself with a secret benefactor who wants to make him into a rich gentleman. The boy comes to learn some hard lessons in life. In this story Dickens wants us to realise that being rich is not the most important thing in life compared to love and loyalty.

Pip meets a convict in the graveyard where the story starts. The convict scares pip into stealing some food for him, and also a file. Pip goes back to the graveyard to give him the food and the file. The convict scoffs the food down and manages to file his chains off. The next day the army turns up at Pip’s house to ask Joe
to fix their handcuffs. The army then go after the convicts. The convict is recaptured but realises that Pip did not tell the army where to find him, so he takes the blame for stealing the food and file fro Pip’s house. He is taken back to the hulks.

The story starts in a broken down desolate graveyard. Pip is sitting, crying over his parent’s graves. Around him is a blanket of dark wet marshes. Dickens wants us to imagine a lonely gloomy landscape. He describes it as ‘The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. The language used in this chapter really increases the tension of the story, this is mainly because it is set in a graveyard and graveyards are usually associated with horror, death and general gloom

Dickens brings into the story a dark and quite scary man.
He is an escaped convict. He is entered into the story through the quote ‘hold your noise!’ cried a terrible man as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still you little devil or ill cut your throat’. The convicts name is Magwitch, he is wearing ‘no hat, broken shoes, covered in mud and cut and bruised from flints and thorns’. Also he is wet and shivering which showed that he had been on the marshes a long time from the start. He is presented as a very frightening man who is intimidating Pip so as he can survive. The language Magwitch uses is very coarse language, he certainly doesn’t use proper English; this suggests that he is uneducated, possibly from a very poor background. To Persuade Pip to get him food and a file Magwitch also threatens Pip with a scary sounding ‘Young man’. The Young Man is introduced when Magwitch says- ‘there’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am an angel… of getting at a boy, at his heart and his liver… that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open’ in this quote Magwitch is saying that if he tells the young man to, he will find Pip, tear him open and then eat his heart and Liver. When Magwitch says this Pip is absolutely terrified, and as soon as he can he runs home without stopping – ‘I looked all round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But now I was frightened
again, and ran home without stopping’

At the end of chapter one, (where Pip meets the convict) Dickens gives a long description of the broad mysterious marshes, ‘the marshes were just a long black horizontal line then… and the river was just another horizontal line…and the sky was just a row of angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed’. The place seems to be a lonely, desolate, deserted area. This is where the convict is found, and the convict also seems to be a lonely and desolate man, he is in bad condition because he is beaten up and bruised and also he is dressed ‘all in coarse grey’ I think this definitely reflects the landscape. Dickens writes that the graveyard is full of nettles and brambles, and that ‘hands of dead people were stretching up cautiously out of their graves’. This creates an atmosphere of terror and evil, but also of loneliness. Also the convict is lonely, Pip is lonely and the landscape generally seems like a lonely deserted place.

In terror Pip runs home. He arrives at his house where he lives with Joe Gargery and his sister –Mrs Joe. Mrs Joe is an evil frightening woman who regrets and hates looking after Pip whereas Joe is a sweet and simple man who loves and protects Pip. Pip is very scared of Mrs Joe because she has a stick that she beats him with regularly called tickler. On this particular night Mrs Joe is out looking for him and has the stick with her, when she arrives home she hits Pip with tickler and then they sit down to have dinner. While they are sitting eating Pip learns a bit more about the great guns, - that they are fired when a prisoner escapes from the hulks. In the morning Pip gets up very early so that he can get into the pantry and steal the food needed to protect himself from the ‘young man’. He steals; bread, cheese rind, mincemeat, brandy, a meat bone, a pork pie and a file. Pip takes these things to the marshes, he meets another escaped convict on the way whom he presumes to be the ‘young man’ so runs away. Pip gives the food to the convict who eats it ravenously ‘like an old dog’. The hulks that the Gargerys were talking about were ships used for holding prisoners.
The prisoners had their hands fastened together by handcuffs and chains fastened to their legs. They were taken to the hulks. The hulks were old ships that did not move. They were moored where the river Thames joined the sea. The hulks were dark, dirty and crowded with men, women and children. After they had been in the hulks for a few months, the convicts were put into ships that took them to Australia or New Zealand, there they worked in mines or on farms and were cruelly treated. They were never allowed to return to England. To get sent to the hulks or deported you only had to do the slightest or crimes because the laws were very strict. One nine-year-old boy was transported to Australia for stealing a
toy.

The story of the convict is left behind as the narrative moves on. The next thing that happens is that pip is invited to ‘Satis’ house where Miss Havisham lives. There he is to play with her niece –Estella.

The years go by and Pip is an apprentice to Joe As a blacksmith. Then he finds out that he has a secret benefactor who wants to make him into a gentleman. Pip thinks this is Miss Havisham and therefore he will have a chance of marrying Estella. Pip does become a gentleman but in doing so he becomes a snob and rejects Joe and his former life. One night Pip receives a mysterious visitor. Pip was in his house with the wind howling and a storm raging ‘It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roof’. Pip heard a noise and it sent shivers down his neck, because he didn’t know who would be coming to his house that late ad in such awful weather. Pip took his lamp and went to the door. As the person was emerging from the darkness Pip could see only bits of a muscular man in his sixties with ‘iron grey hair. As the man fully emerged Pip could not see who the man was but thought he seemed familiar. When Pip sees Magwitch he is completely repelled by him – “repelled him by an insurmountable aversion”. Pip is disgusted when he finds out that Magwitch is his benefactor, because he thought that Miss Havisham was his benefactor and that he was made into a gentleman so that he could marry Estella. He now knows that he in fact has no chance with Estella and I think that that makes him hate Magwitch even more.

Although Pip hates Magwitch I think hat as readers we realise that even though we thought of Magwitch as a horrible dirty old convict he is actually a very decent person who has worked very hard for the benefit of someone else. Also because Magwitch lost his daughter years ago I think he has replaced her by Pip in a way – he is now giving everything thing to Pip so tat he can watch him become a gentleman.
Magwitch grew with no parents. He had been abandoned form a very early age. We learn that someone who had been looking after him for a while had left him all alone. Because he had been left alone Magwitch had no way to make money so that he could buy food and other necessities. Because of this Magwitch was forced to steal his food just to survive. Unfortunately being homeless was in those times a crime so he was in and out of jail for his early life. Being in and out of jail Magwitch became a hardened criminal at an early age. He met a man call Compeyson who he thought would help him but when a scam they were doing went badly Compeyson shifted all the blame onto Magwitch; because Compeyson was a rich well, respected man and Magwitch was seen as vagabond Compeyson was believed and Magwitch was sent to the hulks and then transported. I personally think that Magwitch definitely was not a naturally evil person but he was changed and forced to steal to live by the way society was in those days, somebody should have helped him rather than put him in jail for being abandoned when he had no control over it.

The reason that Magwitch hated Compeyson so much was because he was put in jail for the thing that Compeyson had done, whereas Compeyson got off with a very light sentence. I think Dickens is making the point that there was no justice in Magwitch’s trial and sentence because he was transported because people didn’t believe his story just because he wash homeless, where as everybody believed Compeyson because he was rich and well respected by most people.

During the course of the novel my views of Magwitch have changed a lot. I have gone from seeing him as a threatening violent man deserving to be transported to now a sweet old man who wanted to give something back in return to the little boy who had helped him one dark day. He does above and beyond what would have been needed to say thank you to Pip and turns him into a gentleman just to see how his ‘adoptive son’ has turned out. I also definitely feel sympathy for Magwitch because I think that such a good person deserved and should have had a much better life and should have been treated so much better than he had been, regardless of weather he had been abandoned. Even though he experienced so much unhappiness from being thrown in jail and abandoned by those he needed he went on to be a sweet man who wanted to give a lot to someone special to him. Also I think that the only thing that kept Magwitch going through the many harsh years of exile was the thought that one day he would be able to return to England secretly and see the gentleman he had made out of a caring young boy. Even Pip now sees