Great Expectations

Pip's road runs from the Kent marshes to London and back. Dickens lightly fictionalises the marsh village and "the town", but draws them from real ground: the churchyard at Cooling on the Hoo peninsula, and Rochester, whose Restoration House became Satis House. In London the places are named outright, Little Britain and Smithfield, Newgate, Barnard's Inn. The bbox spans the whole run, from the estuary marshes east of Rochester to Holborn.

Pip

The marsh churchyard, Cooling

Ch. 1 · 0% through the novel

My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river.

The novel opens here, on a raw evening among the graves, where the small bundle of shivers that is Pip is seized by the convict Magwitch risen out of the marsh. Dickens knew this ground: the flat estuary land of the Hoo peninsula, the dikes, and the churchyard at Cooling with its little stone lozenges for dead children.

inspired by Dickens leaves the marsh village unnamed, but drew the churchyard from St James's at Cooling, on the Hoo peninsula north of Rochester, where the row of small children's gravestones Pip describes still stands. The pin marks the real church.

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