Text Leveling System

Great Expectations

RDQ:	3685	Max Word/Sent	124	Total Words	3677		Diff Words	1024
Lex	1110	Ave Word/.Sent	17	Hi Freq occurs	2762	75.1%	Hi freq	391	38.2%
AR	9.0	Long Sentences	49.1	Low Freq occurs	312	8.5%	Low freq	255	24.9%

Chapter I 
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. 
I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine, who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle, I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence. 
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. 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 Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; 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; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip. 
"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!" 
A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin. 
"Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it, sir." 
"Tell us your name!" said the man. "Quick!" 
"Pip, sir." 
"Once more," said the man, staring at me. "Give it mouth!" 
"Pip. Pip, sir." 
"Show us where you live," said the man. "Pint out the place!" 
I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church. 
The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself, for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet, when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling while he ate the bread ravenously. 
"You young dog," said the man, licking his lips, "what fat cheeks you ha' got." 
I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my years, and not strong. 
"Darn me if I couldn't eat em," said the man, with a threatening shake of his head, "and if I han't half a mind to't!" 
I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn't, and held tighter to the tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it; partly, to keep myself from crying. 
"Now lookee here!" said the man. "Where's your mother?" 
"There, sir!" said I. 
He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder. 
"There, sir!" I timidly explained. "Also Georgiana. That's my mother." 
"Oh!" said he, coming back. "And is that your father along er your mother?" 
"Yes, sir," said I; "him too; late of this parish." 
"Ha!" he muttered then, considering. "Who d'ye live with, supposin' you're kindly let to live, which I han't made up my mind about?" 
"My sister, sir, Mrs. Joe Gargery, wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir." 
"Blacksmith, eh?" said he. And looked down at his leg. 
After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his. 
"Now lookee here," he said, "the question being whether you're to be let to live. You know what a file is?" 
"Yes, sir." 
"And you know what wittles is?" 
"Yes, sir." 
After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a greater sense of helplessness and danger. 
"You get me a file." He tilted me again. "And you get me wittles." He tilted me again. "You bring 'em both to me." He tilted me again. "Or I'll have your heart and liver out." He tilted me again. 
I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both hands, and said, "If you would kindly please to let me keep upright, sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick, and perhaps I could attend more." 
He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped over its own weathercock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:  
"You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted, and ate. Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. I am a keeping that young man from harming of you at the present moment, with great difficulty. I find it very hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?" 
I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery, early in the morning. 
"Say Lord strike you dead if you don't!" said the man. 
I said so, and he took me down. 
"Now," he pursued, "you remember what you've undertook, and you remember that young man, and you get home!" 
"Goo-good night, sir," I faltered. 
"Much of that!" said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. "I wish I was a frog. Or a eel!" 
At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms, clasping himself, as if to hold himself together, and limped towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in. 
When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy or the tide was in. 
The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered, like an unhooped cask upon a pole, an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But now I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.

Chapter II 
My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbors because she had brought me up "by hand." Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand. 
She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow, a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness. 
My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day of her life. 
Joe's forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the dwellings in our country were, most of them, at that time. When I ran home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment I raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it, sitting in the chimney corner. 
"Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she's out now, making it a baker's dozen." 
"Is she?" 
"Yes, Pip," said Joe; "and what's worse, she's got Tickler with her." 
At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame. 
"She sot down," said Joe, "and she got up, and she made a grab at Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That's what she did," said Joe, slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at it; "she Ram-paged out, Pip." 
"Has she been gone long, Joe?" I always treated him as a larger species of child, and as no more than my equal. 
"Well," said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, "she's been on the Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She's a coming! Get behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you." 
I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing me I often served as a connubial missile at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his great leg. 
"Where have you been, you young monkey?" said Mrs. Joe, stamping her foot. "Tell me directly what you've been doing to wear me away with fret and fright and worrit, or I'd have you out of that corner if you was fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys." 
"I have only been to the churchyard," said I, from my stool, crying and rubbing myself. 
"Churchyard!" repeated my sister. "If it warn't for me you'd have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?" 
"You did," said I. 
"And why did I do it, I should like to know?" exclaimed my sister. 
I whimpered, "I don't know." 
"I don't!" said my sister. "I'd never do it again! I know that. I may truly say I've never had this apron of mine off since born you were. It's bad enough to be a blacksmith's wife (and him a Gargery) without being your mother." 
My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at the fire. For the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me in the avenging coals. 
"Hah!" said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. "Churchyard, indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two." One of us, by the by, had not said it at all. "You'll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days, and O, a precious pair you'd be without me!" 
As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times. 
My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread and butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib, where it sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaster, using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other. 
On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joe's housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread and butter down the leg of my trousers. 
The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose I found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water. And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each other's admiration now and then, which stimulated us to new exertions. To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my untouched bread and butter on the other. At last, I desperately considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at me, and got my bread and butter down my leg. 
Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he didn't seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw that my bread and butter was gone. 
The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold of his bite and stared at me, were too evident to escape my sister's observation. 
"What's the matter now?" said she, smartly, as she put down her cup. 
"I say, you know!" muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very serious remonstrance. "Pip, old chap! You'll do yourself a mischief. It'll stick somewhere. You can't have chawed it, Pip." 
"What's the matter now?" repeated my sister, more sharply than before. 
"If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I'd recommend you to do it," said Joe, all aghast. "Manners is manners, but still your elth's your elth." 
By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while against the wall behind him, while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily on. 
"Now, perhaps you'll mention what's the matter," said my sister, out of breath, "you staring great stuck pig." 
Joe looked at her in a helpless way, then took a helpless bite, and looked at me again. 
"You know, Pip," said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek, and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone, "you and me is always friends, and I'd be the last to tell upon you, any time. But such a " he moved his chair and looked about the floor between us, and then again at me "such a most oncommon Bolt as that!" 
"Been bolting his food, has he?" cried my sister. 
"You know, old chap," said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe, with his bite still in his cheek, "I Bolted, myself, when I was your age frequent and as a boy I've been among a many Bolters; but I never see your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it's a mercy you ain't Bolted dead." 
My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair, saying nothing more than the awful words, "You come along and be dosed."

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Colorful, figurative

Sentences: Many Long Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concepts: Abstract/Complex Social

Chapters

Author's purpose: Implied

Prior Knowledge: Familiarity

Sequence of Events: Mostly chronological

Mature Concepts: With some uncommon experiences

Features

Character traits

Character development

Integral Setting - Historical

Complex plot

First Person

Foreign words

Dialect/Accents

Unusual use of vocabulary

Topic

Attitudes

Challenges

Wealth

Self Esteem

*Family & Friends

*Feelings, Behaviors

Relationships

Low Frequency Words

achievement	acquaintance	adjoined	admiration	advantage
advice	aforesaid	aghast	ally	apothecary
applied	authority	available	avenging	beacon
betwixt	blacksmith's	bolters	bolting	briars
calculating	cask	casting	cautiously	chap
chawed	circumstances	clasping	commit	companionship
comparison	competition	concerning	concluded	conclusion
confidence	confidences	confidential	connubial	consistent
consternation	contemplated	cough	curls	d'ye
depression	depth	derived	desperately	dexterity
dikes	diminishing	disconsolately	dismal	divined
dosed	dreadful	dreadfully	dutch	earnestly
elth	elth's	eluding	emptied	evident
evidently	exertions	existence	explicit	expressed
faltered	fancies	fastened	fellow	fenced
flaxen	flints	foreshadowed	forge	freckled
freemasonry	frequent	fret	fugitive	further
gargery	gargerys	general	gibbet	giddy
glancing	glared	grater	grievous	guiltily
gulped	halves	han't	harming	helpless
helplessly	helplessness	hewed	horizontal	housekeeping
identity	immediately	imparted	impregnable	impression
improbable	indebted	inscription	intelligence	intermixed
intersected	investigation	ironed	kindly	knowing
lair	lamed	larcenous	larceny	latch
latter	leaden	likeness	limping	liver
lozenges	marsh	marshes	memorable	mentally
mention	mentioned	mercy	merit	mischief
missile	morrow	moulding	mounds	muttered
mysterious	natured	neighbors	numbed	nutmeg
obstruction	occasion	oncommon	opposite	overgrown
paged	parish	partickler	pecooliar	photographs
pint	plaster	pleaded	pledge	plunge
pockets	pollards	pondering	pounced	powerfully
practically	precious	premises	presently	prevailing
prospect	purchase	purpose	pursued	ravenously
recommend	redness	regarding	religiously	remonstrance
reproach	reputation	researches	reserve	resolution
resolved	sacred	sailors	savage	sawed
seized	separating	sheltering	shuddering	sickly
smartly	smothered	solemnly	sot	squally
stamping	stimulated	stout	strayed	strictest
stung	sufferers	sumever	supposin	tempered
terms	terror	thoughtful	threatening	threshold
tickler	tilted	timidly	to't	tobias
tombstone	tombstones	towards	tremendous	trenchant
trifle	trousers	truly	uncomfortable	unconscious
undecided	undersized	undertook	unhooped	universal
unreasonably	upright	vivid	wain	waistcoat
warn't	weakness	weathercock	whimpered	whisker
whiskers	whites	wittles	worrit	yonder