Dickens establishes unique characters immediately, as well. Pip is “the small bundle of shivers.” The convict’s feelings as he stumbles through the graveyard, come across clearly: “ . . . he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.” With the convict’s use of w’s in his words — (wittles instead of vittles) and the convict’s eating style (similar to that of a large dog snapping up mouthfuls and watching for danger), Dickens defines the convict’s social class, education level, current life situation, as well as his feelings about that. The description of Mrs. Gargery (Mrs. Joe) as having a heavy hand that she uses much on Pip and her husband, as well as Pip’s description of his sister’s method of buttering his bread and getting pins from her bib stuck in the bread, tell a great deal about her nature, how her marriage works, and what Pip thinks of her, too.
In these first three chapters, the reader also sees reoccurring character tags and repeating elements that further cement the characters in the readers’ heads: Mrs. Joe constantly tells Pip about “being brought up by hand”; Joe refers to Pip as “old chap,” and uses w’s in words like “conwict”; the convict has an unusual clicking in his throat, and there is the recurring image of the iron shackle on his leg. (These repetitions were necessary because the story was published in weekly installments and readers may not have remembered the characters without such clues.)
