Time Stood Still

“It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock a long time ago.” (Page 66)

Time plays an important role in this novel, especially since it is biographical of the character Pip. In this part of the novel, Pip recognizes an interesting quirk about Miss Havisham and her manor; all of the clocks within the manor have been set to the same time of twenty minutes to nine and every other object seems to have remained stationary for years. Although this peculiarity provides for some grotesque scenery (for instance, a moldy cake and a thick layer of dust covering everything), it also symbolizes that Havisham's life has been frozen in time. At one point in the story, Miss Havisham even remarks that she knows “nothing about times” showing how greatly she is affected by her lost sense of time. This particular passage is important because it foreshadows the discovery of why Miss Havisham is living in the past (she was abandoned upon her wedding day). Although this information may seem unimportant, Dickens uses it to tie several of the characters together – Compeyson and Magwitch, Magwitch and Pip, Pip and Estella, etc. Miss Havisham's memory of being left at the alter also affects how she views the relationship between Pip and Estella. This is why she feels devastated when she discovers that Estella has chosen someone other than Pip to marry; she pities him similarly to how she pities herself.