Great Expectations Hyperbole Quotes

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with theatrical declamation, – as it now appears to me, something like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third, – and ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 4. Mr. Wopsle is a pompous church clerk in Pip’s village who loves the sound of his own voice. In the novel he is served up to the reader as an object of comic relief and social satire. Pip describes how the officious Wopsle says grace at Pip’s family dinner table as if it was a theatrical Shakespearean production. Dickens makes effective use of hyperbole and parody here to take a poke at the self-importance of English Victorian churchmen. The “Ghost in Hamlet” and “Richard the Third” are allusions to characters in William Shakespeare plays.

“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla, – “I was obliged to be firm. I said, ‘It WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.’ I told him that, without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried about it from breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 11. The ridiculous Mrs. Camilla is at once dramatic and hyperbolic in her comments about the trimmings worn at the funeral of the wife of a man named Tom. With absurd exaggeration, she says she cried about it from breakfast to dinner and hurt her digestion. Dickens uses Mrs. Camilla as a satirical figure to satirize aspects of upper class Victorian society like its superficiality.

“Camilla, my dear, it is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 11. Cousin Raymond says this to wife Mrs. Camilla when she complains of suffering “nervous jerkings” because she cares too much for others. The absurd hyperbolic image of Camilla’s leg shortening is topped only by her ridiculous claim of hysterical leg “jerkings” because of worry over Miss Havisham’s health. Raymond and Camilla are parasitic relatives who hover around Miss Havisham’s house hoping to inherit her fortune. Both characters are satirical creations of Dickens.

“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the table but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.” She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking at the table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything around in a state to crumble under a touch. “When the ruin is complete,” said she, with a ghastly look, “and when they lay me dead, in my bride’s dress on the bride’s table – which shall be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him – so much the better if it is done on this day!”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 11. Dressed in her yellowed wedding dress, Miss Havisham makes this melodramatic and hyperbolic speech to a horrified Pip. She is speaking to him in the room where her wedding feast was to have taken place years before. Using a grim metaphor, she compares her grief to being eaten by teeth sharper than those of the mice that have gnawed at her wedding feast. She speaks of her “ruin” or demise, vowing that when she is laid out in her bride’s dress for the funeral, it will be “the finished curse upon him.” She is referring to her fiancé Compeyson on whom she wants revenge, hoping that he will be cursed by her death. Miss Havisham’s “withered” wedding dress foreshadows the unhappy life Pip and Estella will have. The decay of Satis House comes through strongly in this passage: the yellowed tablecloth on the table, the cobwebs, everything worn away and crumbling, including Miss Havisham.

And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated its confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the plain honest working life to which I was born had nothing in it to be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient means of self-respect and happiness.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 18. In the novel Joe and Biddy represent the decent and honest working class, one in which Pip grew up in. As a boy he knows that he should be proud and not ashamed of his social class roots. However, his encounter with the proud and beautiful Estella has plunged him into conflict about where he wants to fit in socially in the world. The scale of his confusion is emphasized by the use of the hyperbolic description “fifty thousand-fold.”

“Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,” said Estella, “and of course if it ceased to beat I should cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no – sympathy – sentiment – nonsense.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 29. Estella is characterized as cold-hearted almost from the instant she appears in the novel. Her aloof demeanor with Pip and the way she toys with his emotions border on cruelty. While Pip is completely infatuated with her and clearly still is, she warns that loving her is a pointless exercise. Using heart as a metaphor for her feelings, she explains to Pip that she has no tenderness or sentiment there. Her adoptive mother Miss Havisham has clearly done a sterling job in raising her to be an emotionless heartbreaker and tormentor of men. We see the effective use of hyperbole in this passage.

She hung upon Estella’s beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 38. In Pip’s observation we see how Miss Havisham regards her daughter not as a person, but an object of beauty to be used and controlled. Note the use of the grotesque, hyperbolic, metaphorical image of Miss Havisham “devouring” Estella. She is not literally eating her daughter. But this portrays her as a possessive, controlling and obsessive parent, who sees herself as having ownership of Estella. She is the hungry animal while Estella is the food in her mad quest to use her daughter’s beauty to wreak revenge on men.

We lived at the top of the last house, and the wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they rocked, that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse. Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors open and looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black windows (opening them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out, and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering, and that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 39. Pip describes the intensity of a thunderstorm he experiences one night while living in London. Dickens uses hyperbole, simile, personification and metaphor to emphasize the ferocity of the storm. When Pip says that “the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering” the lamps are personified by being given the human action of “shuddering.” Pip imagining the house he is in as a “storm-beaten lighthouse” is a good example of metaphor and hyperbole. There are also vivid similes that heighten the drama in this important chapter where Pip is about to learn the identity of his mystery benefactor. The wind is compared to “discharges of cannon, or breakings of the sea,” while the coal fires in the river barges are like “red-hot splashes in the rain.” The storm that rages outside the house foreshadows the tumultuous and life-altering events and revelations that await Pip.

All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way. As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an elephant.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 40. Dickens uses hyperbole, or exaggeration for effect, in this passage from Pip humorously telling us about his total lack of a plan. He could as soon “have formed an elephant,” he says. Living his new life has made him miserable.

“You had better – and would much sooner when you had thought well of it – chop off that bandaged left hand of yours with your bandaged right hand, and then pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut that off too.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 51. Jaggers uses hyperbole in this warning to Pip about the destructive costs of revealing deep-rooted secrets about people. In the reference to cutting off hands, this is an allusion to Mark 9.43: “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.” The secret Jaggers is talking about is Estella’s parentage.

“But you said to me,” returned Estella, very earnestly, “‘God bless you, God forgive you!’ And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now, – now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 59. In the novel’s final scene, Estella recalls what Pip said to her when they parted after announcing her engagement to Bentley Drummle. She tells him how her own suffering has taught her to sympathize with the sufferings of others, like Pip. Using hyperbole and metaphor, she speaks of how life has broken and reshaped her and made her into a better person. After a loveless and failed marriage to the cruel Drummle, she now appreciates the importance of love and what was in Pip’s heart. She sees what a special person Pip is and recalls how even as she broke his heart he forgave her. Among the themes explored in this passage are guilt and shame.
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