This definitions covers Key Terms for This Topic within Magwitch & Miss Havisham for GCSE English Literature. Revise Magwitch & Miss Havisham in Great Expectations for GCSE English Literature with 12 exam-style questions and 12 flashcards. This topic shows up very often in GCSE exams, so students should be able to explain it clearly, not just recognise the term. It is section 11 of 17 in this topic. Make sure you can use the exact wording confidently, because definition marks are often lost through vague language.
📖 Key Terms for This Topic
- Retrospective narrator
- A narrator who tells the story looking back from a later point in time. Adult Pip narrating child Pip's story creates dramatic irony — the reader often knows more than child Pip does, or can sense when child Pip's judgements are shaped by prejudice rather than understanding.
- Dramatic irony
- When the reader or audience knows something a character does not. Dickens uses dramatic irony extensively: we discover that Magwitch is Pip's benefactor before Pip does, creating tension; we understand Miss Havisham's self-destruction before she articulates it.
- Sustained metaphor
- A comparison developed across a whole text rather than in a single phrase. Miss Havisham's stopped clocks, decaying dress, and rotting cake form a sustained metaphor for the refusal to allow time — and therefore healing — to pass.
- Foil
- A character who highlights another's qualities through contrast. Magwitch and Miss Havisham function as foils to each other: same betrayal (Compeyson), opposite responses (love vs revenge, future-orientation vs frozen time).
Practice questions for Magwitch & Miss Havisham
At what time are the clocks stopped in Miss Havisham's house?
Explain how Dickens uses the decaying wedding dress and stopped clocks to present Miss Havisham in Chapter 8. [2 marks]
Quick recall flashcards
You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?
<div class="fc-quotation-meta"><span>Miss Havisham</span><span>Chapter 8</span><span>Time · Power · Isolation · Introduction</span></div><p><strong>What it shows:</strong> Dickens presents Miss Havisham asserting her own strangeness as a form of power. She frames her self-imposed darkness as something Pip should fear — not passively eccentric but actively wielding her withdrawal. 'Since you were born' exaggerates the span, connecting her frozen moment to Pip's entire existence.</p><div class="fc-quotation-significance"><strong>Significance</strong>This is Miss Havisham's first spoken lines to Pip. Dickens introduces her as someone who uses her suffering as authority. The question itself — 'not afraid?' — is a control mechanism, as much a test of Pip as anything Jaggers later deploys.</div><div class="fc-quotation-deployment"><strong>Use in essays on</strong>Miss Havisham's introduction; power and control; the theme of time; how Dickens presents female characters in unconventional ways</div>
What mnemonic helps remember Magwitch's arc and his contrast with Miss Havisham?
MAGWITCH: Marshes → Australia → Gentleman-maker → Wrongly sentenced → Implicated by Compeyson → True love → Class system's victim → Hero by the end. MISS H: Frozen time → Estella as weapon → Abandoned by Compeyson → Revenge via manipulation → Self-knowledge (too late, but real). Both connect through COMPEYSON — always name the link in essays for Level 5+ thinking.