How Does Charles Dickens Describe Miss Havisham

Each house in Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations is made to be like the character that lives within it, to emphasize the personalities and characteristics of each person. When Pip first meets Miss Havisham, he thinks of her as weak and grotesque just like her house. He believes that she is just “a skeleton in ashes of a rich dress” (56); when he tours Satis House he is confronted by a house covered in “a great many iron bars” (53) and on the inside it’s filled with “ominous passages” (55). Charles Dickens uses similar adjectives to describe both Miss Havisham and the house; every word used to describe has a connotation of being absurd. The house enforces the idea of Havisham as a strange and mysterious character, Satis House shares the characteristics of her without directly saying so, which helps the reader to understand Havisham. …show more content…
When Pip goes to Wemmick’s house for the first time he thinks “it [is] the smallest house [he] ever saw” (197), but later he discovers there’s much more, there’s a “drawbridge and [a] arbour and [a] lake and [a] fountain,” (201). You can see that the house has two sides just like Wemmick, Wemmick is known to be normal, but when you get to know him you understand that he actually has many more things going on in his life. Dickens connected Wemmick to his house and to help the reader get to understand Wemmick in a different way, than just blatantly saying it. When Pip meets Mr. Barley he is overwhelmed by how disgusting both his house looks and his personality are, you can see how bad each one is because they are surrounded by one another. It is “a queer house upon Mill Pond Bank,” it’s covered with the “ooze and slime of tide,” (360) soon after Pip sees the outside he meets