Miss Havisham In Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Dickens uses this description of the Havisham Manor to give Pip’s impression of surrealness surrounding Miss Havisham and her house. Pip has just been apprenticed to Joe and goes to visit Miss Havisham, and, as he walks home, he reflects on the decrepitness and the age of the house and its contents. As the sentence progresses, Dickens chooses to order his descriptions in increasing intensity of spookiness and specificity, seemingly ‘zooming’ in to smaller and smaller objects and ending with the main clause. Dickens also chooses to structure the descriptions in the order Pip has seen them on his first visit to Miss Havisham, starting with a ‘dull old house’ and ending the descriptions with the “clocks [that] had stopped Time…,” to allow the reader
Pip continues to remember his visit and later goes on to detail an even scarier description: a “faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass….” Pip is comparing Miss Havisham to a ghost, seemingly unreal and unrelatable to a mortal human. He has a lack of connection to Miss Havisham, seeing her as something static and unchanging, like an old house or a room, in contrast to how he views himself, dynamic and changing. Next, Pip discusses how he feels the “stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place….” Again, everything around Pip is changing: he’s apprenticed to Joe, it’s his birthday, and Biddy moved in with his family, but Miss Havisham and her property remain the same. Estella’s feelings towards Pip hasn’t changed either, as she is still as cold and distant as she was the first time she met Pip. The strangeness of Miss Havisham and her manor astonishes Pip, and, despite him being dreadfully afraid of them, he still feels himself looking closer and becoming more and more fascinated and obsessed with them. This attraction towards Miss Havisham surfaces later in the novel, when Pip becomes convinced that Miss Havisham has a plan for him and Estella together despite having no evidence of