In both Mr. Pumblechook's shop and in Miss Havisham's house, vegetation is trying to break free of the prisonlike interior. For example, in chapter 8, Pip says the following about Mr. Pumblechook's shop:
When I peeped into one or two on the lower tiers, and saw the tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom.
In this image, seeds are trying to break free of the prisonlike drawers in which Mr. Pumblechook has encased them.
Later, when Pip visits Estella and Miss Havisham in Miss Havisham's house, he notes:
Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old wall: not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the house,...
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and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes walked there.
Again, in this image, the vegetation sprouts beyond the wall of the house. It is almost as if the vegetation is kept in a prison behind the wall. In both places, vegetation is kept at bay and imprisoned. The vegetation is a metaphor for Pip, a growing boy who is kept imprisoned by controlling people like Miss Havisham and Mr. Pumblechook (and Pip's sister). He wants to break out of the prisons imposed on him, just as the vegetation is trying to break free of Mr. Pumblechook's shop and Miss Havisham's garden.
Chapter VIII introduces the reader to Miss Havisham's house, ironically called Satis House--which means "enough," as in "satisfaction." First, however, Pip visits the shop of his self-proclaimed benefactor, the gluttonous Mr. Pumblechook. Dickens prepares the reader for the decayed and barren Satis House by contrasting it with the corn-chandler's establishment, stocked with impending life. Both places, however, are jails in their own ways.
Pumblechook is a seed salesman. His shop is described as "peppercorny" and "farinaceous" (meaning mealy, like hot breakfast cereals made out of grain--like oatmeal, porridge, grits). It is full of seeds for crops and vegetables, flowers and bulbs, but all this potential life is confined in packets and drawers waiting to be released "from those jails" so that it can sprout and bloom.
Pip arrives at Satis House under escort (Pumblechook), waits at the iron barred gate for admittance by Estella, who carries the keys. Estella, like a jailor, takes Pip across yards and down long, dark corridors, depositing him at his destination and retrieving him again as ordered. She allows him exercise in the yard and seems to be everywhere. He watches her ascend iron stairs and then imagines a beam to be suspending a hanged figure. Even Pip's thoughts are full of the language of prison--"injustice," "coercion," "conviction," "punishment," and "penitential performances." There is nothing blooming in the greenhouse or garden of Satis House. The grass grows in the crevices, cucumber frames are broken, the box tree is overgrown, and everything that still lives is rank and weedy.
Satis House