Dicken's recreation of Great Expectations

Great Expectations

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister - Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine - who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle - I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

Being an innocent infant, I only learned about my father that he was a carpenter, just a plain ordinary carpenter. Reasonably honest, though. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where the whole class drift was upwards and there was no reason to suppose it would ever stop being so; where money could buy education, accent and fine clothes – all attributes of a gentleman; and where the cruel and hard order of commerce prevailed over all the things on Earth; and - who knows? - maybe over all the things situated at the other end of my own existence, too. I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly significant about this matter of affairs.

 

There is no doubt whatever about the fact that my character was also affected by being grown up solitary in the Marshes – a funereal, drab, flat, wet country, intersected with numerous hillocks, gates and dikes and with scattered cattle feeding on it; and right beyond me the deep dark winding river; and further away in the distance the immense, wild, rough, menacing sea. For good or for evil, I had nothing before me. And from the beginning it was a clear fact that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and that I was privileged to see the ghosts and spirits of my dead parents and brothers; both these gifts inevitably connected, as it was believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born orphans.