Magwitch & Miss Havisham

English LiteratureAQAGCSEUnit: Great Expectations
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The basics

The Man in the Graveyard and the Woman Who Stopped Time

📖 The Man in the Graveyard and the Woman Who Stopped Time

Chapter 1: a child alone in a churchyard, and a leg iron emerges from behind a gravestone. Chapter 8: a rotting wedding cake on a table, clocks stopped at twenty past nine. Dickens introduces Magwitch and Miss Havisham as figures of shock — but both are, by the novel's end, his most sympathetic creations. The trick Dickens pulls is to engineer a reversal: our initial judgement of both characters was the class system's judgement, not a moral one.
Spotlight
Stage 1 — EMERGENCE: First Encounter, First Judgement

Dickens presents both characters through Pip's child-eye narration — which means through fear. Magwitch in Chapter 1 is rendered as pure threat: he turns Pip upside down, demands food, and threatens to have Pip's "heart and liver" eaten. Pip's terror is visceral and, for most readers, shared. Dickens exploits this reac

Exam tip

Earn the mark scheme marks

🧠 Memory Aid: MAGWITCH and MISS H

MAGWITCH: Marshes → Australia → Gentleman-maker → Wrongly sentenced → Implicated in Compeyson's crime → True love dies in custody → Class system's victim → Hero (by the end)

MISS H: Frozen time → Estella as weapon → Abandoned by Compeyson → Revenge via manipulation → Self-knowledge arrives too late (but arrives)

Both arcs connect through Compeyson — remember him as the structural link Dickens built deliberately. In essays, naming this link immediately signals Level 5+ thinking.

Now try it yourself

Quiz · Question 1 of 12

At what time are the clocks stopped in Miss Havisham's house?

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