Great Expectations - Context



  • A book about social class.
  • How in a class based society such as that of Victorian England, class discrimination seep into and contaminate the deepest and subtlest levels of human feeling and motivation.
  • Many of the events from Charles Dickens early life are mirrored in Great Expectations.  
Pip...
  • Lives in the marsh country.
  • Works at a job he hates.
  • Considers himself too good for his surroundings.
  • Experiences material success in London at a very early age.
Set in the Victorian England...
  • A time when great social changes were sweeping the nation.
  • Industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had transformed the social landscape.
  • Although social class was no longer dependent on one's birth, the gap remained.
  • More and more people moved from the country to the city in search of greater economic opportunity.
  • Throughout England - manners of the upper class were very strict and conservative.
  • Gentlemen and Ladies were expected to have thorough classical education, and to behave appropriately in innumerable social situations.
  • These conditions, felt in almost every facet of Great Expectations.
  • Pip's sudden rise from country laborer to city gentleman - forces him to move from one social extreme to another, while dealing with strict roles and expectations that governed Victorian England.
Pip's feelings and attitudes towards things are fundamentally altered..
  • New ambitions for book learning, correct speech.
  • Self conscious about clothing and appearances.
  • Begins to feel ambivalent about the prospects of following a career as a blacksmith.
  • Becomes critical of the rough casualness of his rural surroundings.
  • And most damaging, loses capacity for spontaneous uncritical intimacy with his closest companion.
  • At all these levels and others, Pip's attitudes come to be shaped by the class divisions which structure his society as a whole.
  • To reveal this painful process to the eyes of his readers was perhaps Dickens's principal thematic aim in writing Great Expectations.

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