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.