Classics Retold

In chapter 4 of Great Expectations, Mrs Joe asks Pip: "Where the duece have you been?  Duece is an Old English expression. It is a mild way of asking "Where the devil you have been", but it is much less offensive.  Mrs Joe is expressing her anger, impatience, and suspicion because Pip have been away longer.  The origin of the term is not known, but in Dickens's time "the deuce" had long been a common euphemism for " the devil".

Chapter 4 of Great Expectations  "I and my conscience showed ourselves," writes Pip.  This is a humorous way of describing Pip's state of mind after stealing food and file for the convict.  When he comes into the presence of the others he feels he is not alone.  His guilty conscience follows him closely.  Dickens personified Pip's conscience, treating it almost like a person standing beside him.  Dickens exposes the inner life of a child.  Pip has not been accused of anything, but his conscience makes him feel exposed and terrified.  Much of the tension in these chapters come from not punishment, but from Pip's fear that his guilty conscience will betray him. 

In chapter 4 of Great Expectations, Dickens deliberately use the word "reaping" instead of "sweeping" to give a humorous and metaphoric touch to his characters and the atmosphere.  Mrs Joe is cleaning the house with excessive energy.  The word reap is normally used in the context of harvest. It is not ordinary verb for cleaning floors.  Mrs Joe is wielding broom as if it were a harvesting tool, cutting everything down in her path. She is fierce and relentless as though she is attacking.  Her husband Joe Gargery is sitting upon the doorstep.  He is quietly retreated to keep out of her way.  It also reflects the patriarchal division of labour between men and women.  Here, we see Joe Gargery does not try to overreach. Pip sees Joe almost as a fellow sufferer.

It was a  rimy  morning, and very damp.  I had seen it lying on the outside of my little window, as if some  goblin had been crying there all night and use the window for a poket-handkerchief. Now I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and grass like spider's webs, hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade.  On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist was thick, and  the wooden finger on the post directing to our village.  I saw it when I came close to it.  It dripped and seemed to me like a phantom directing me to the Hulks.  The mist was heavier when I got upon the marshes.  Instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me.  The gates, the dykes, and the banks came bursting at me through the mist, and it seemed to me that they cried at me, "A boy with somebody else's pork pie!  Stop him!"  The cattle came staring at me.   They steamed out their nostrils, "Halloa thi...

In chapter 3 of Great Expectations, "damn 'em with their tramp" the words spoken by the convict in the marsh.  The words carry the curse against the prison guards and soldiers tracking him down.  He utters these words to Pip who brings him food and file . Tramp here means heavy, rhythmic, sound and echo of marching footsteps. The word is an onomatopoeia: a figure of speech where words imitate, or resemble the sound of thing they describe.

Thankee is an informal dialect, an archaic way of saying "thank you". People began writing and saying it in the early 1800s as a shortening of "I thank you"