Chapter of Great Expectations - Study Guide by Charles Dickens

that runs throughout Great Expectations. The manacled convicts with whom Pip shares a coach smell of "bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn and hearth-stone", a remarkably detailed description. The air in the hotel room in which Pip and Estella have their dejected tea smells of ‘a strong combination of stable with soup stock’, the squalid lodging house in which Pip spends the night when advised to lie low is insect-ridden and smells "of cold soot and hot dust" and the inn at the end is "a dirty place enough" in which "we found the air as carefully excluded… as if air were fatal to life". These sordid details typify the unromantic atmosphere of the novel.