Summary:
"Great Expectations" is somewhat biographical, in that events that Charles Dickens lived are seen in the character of Pip. Key themes in the novel are the trials and tribulations of love, injustice and class discrimination.
The works of Charles Dickens are of repute status, and are recognizable even by the scarce reader. Literary pieces such as Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities are of the more distinguishable books by Dickens, yet not many have pursued his other less discernible works such as Great Expectations. This piece epitomizes the life of Dickens, allowing him to circumvent his past by depicting it through a young boy named Pip (Ackroyd 182). Growing up in the times of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens had to cope with social classes; where his family was a part of the poor working class who were discriminated upon by being given limited rights, and exposed to crime and disease (Sanders 21, 22). Great Expectations is known as the life of Dickens through the eyes of Pip, a boy born into a lower class, striving to be of gentlemen status (Epstein 257). Dickens's trials and tribulations of love are prevalent in Great Expectations, and the injustice inflicted upon him while overcoming his lower class stature bestowed Dickens with the opportunity to express his inner feelings through the medium of writing.
Trials and Tribulations of Love
Love is an aspect of life which offers one of the greatest, yet also worst feelings known to man. The notion of obtaining a love is countered by the loss of a loved one, serving as a reminder to society of the serious nature of love. Through Dickens's life there have been many instances in which he has experienced the highs of love, yet at the other end of the spectrum is where Dickens realized the lowest of lows. As an 18 year old, Dickens became engrossed with a woman who did not reciprocate his feelings. Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banker, did not see in Charles what he saw in her, leaving him in a devastated disposition (Ackroyd 18). As noted by Dickens enthusiasts, his obsession with Maria blinded him of everything except her, and the despondency felt upon rejection was too much to endure. As stated by Dickens, he believes his love for her exceeds any other living creature before him, and upon learning of his failure, the pain rendered was too much (Ackroyd 20).
her name was Maria Beadnell [...] he became obsessed with her [...] Yet it seems that Maria Beadnell did not return his affection [...] "I have been so long used to inward wretchedness and real, real misery [...] I have borne more from you than I do believe any living creature breathing ever bore from a woman before." (Ackroyd 18-20)
Dickens', through tolerating this ordeal was burdened with the habit of reticence and repression which prevented him from expressing his true feelings to his family (Epstein 39). Reminiscent to the character of Pip in Great Expectations, both were not able to demonstrate their feelings to their family, apparent when Pip returned from Ms. Havisham's house and told his family that he had a wonderful time, yet he loathed it there and even cried to vent his sadness (Dickens 70).
As the years continued the attachment to Maria was still prevalent within Dickens, but he was able to move on and marry a young girl named Catherine. Subsequently, Dickens's intense passion led him to another woman named Ellen Ternan. He longed to be with her and abscond his unhappy marriage, but his marriage symbolized prison, which he could not escape. Dickens expressed his displeasure to his friend Forster (Ackroyd 164);
he found his own wife to be an intolerable burden [...] they made each other, "uneasy and unhappy," [...] a writer who had celebrated domestic harmony [...] could hardly drag his wife through the courts. He was trapped as surely as any of the characters in his fictions. (Ackroyd 166, 167)
In his early years Dickens was severely wounded by his inability to obtain his love, and now his subjection to flee his marriage serves as another focal point of love. Once Dickens made the commitment to love, by marriage, he no longer had the opportunity to renounce it, leaving him a prisoner of his one time love.
These events that transpired during Dickens's life are evident factors which lead him to write many of his novels including Great Expectations. As researched by many people, Dickens utilized writing as a medium to express his inner feelings through imaginary characters, rather than to face these feelings in reality (Sanders 187). Many of Dickens's love figures are portrayed in his novels, re-creating situations that occurred to him.
In the figures of Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities and Estella in Great Expectations he is creating a twin image of the unobtainable young woman who haunts the passionate consciousness of an unsuccessful lover. (Ackroyd 182)
In addition through the creation of Pip, Dickens also vented his emotions and feelings concerning his first love, Maria. The character of Estella embodies the rejection and denial which Dickens evokes from the memories of Maria. As seen in this passage in Great Expectations, Pip, like Dickens yearns for the love of a woman which disrupts his ordinary, mundane manner, leaving him distressed and distorted (Leacock 170).
"The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's, and she's more beautiful than anybody ever was [...] and I want to be a gentleman on her account." [...] All the while knowing the madness of my heart to be so very mad and misplaced. (Dickens 137)
The life of Dickens is seen through the eyes of Pip in Great Expectations, and had Dickens not encountered any of the women he fell in love with, many of his works may not have been created. The love quandaries in which Dickens found himself in throughout his life caused much grief and anguish and led Dickens to suppress inner feelings from past incidents (Epstein 258). By writing Great Expectations, he was able to articulate these feelings without having to deal with them on a personal basis and through the character of Pip; Great Expectations was born into a novel of influential status.
The Injustices of the World
Upon obtaining influential status, Great Expectations served as a reminder to society of the injustices inflicted upon the common man. Dickens was able to tell the tale of a boy living in anguish who experiences unfairness everyday at no fault of his own. In order to produce such a lavish tale, Dickens had to draw on past events in his life to generate the intense misfortunes done to Pip, the main character. Growing up as a child, Dickens was pulled from school and sent to work at a Blacking warehouse while the rest of his family lived with their father in prison. Dickens was separated from the only life he knew, his family, and was forced to adjust to his new surroundings. His experience at the warehouse was the most traumatizing period in his life, and though he only worked there for one year, it felt like a lifetime (Leacock 9-12). Dickens has clearly made it known that working at that warehouse stole from his childhood, one that he could not get back, and his anger is prevalent in this passage:
"No words can express the secret agony of my soul [...] the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless [...] what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me never to be brought back any more." (Leacock 9, 10)
Dickens was merely an innocent child trying to conform to society's expectations of children, yet he was whisked away to work, and his childhood was forever gone. At no fault of his own was his youth ruined, attesting to Dickens's testament that the injustice imposed on him instigated him to become a distraught child living in what was seen to him as an unjust world, thus leading him to create Great Expectations (Epstein 148).
Though Dickens working at the warehouse plays a significant role in the writing of Great Expectations, a young woman, (once again), provides another immensely important motive. When Dickens was a young man he fell in love with a woman, yet their love could not come true due to his family ties. Dickens's father had a criminal record which the parents of the woman, did not regard highly of. Due to this he was forbade from seeing their daughter, leaving his quench for love unrequited, as told by Dickens aficionados (Ackroyd 18).
Her parents had discovered, too, that John Dickens (Charles' father), had once been detained in a debtors' prison, which, as far as they were concerned, deepened the unsuitability of the match. (Ackroyd 18)
Though Dickens had done nothing to deserve this banishment from the woman he loved, the faults of his father were enough to prevent Dickens from meeting his love. The injustice imposed on Dickens left him scarred for life, and was only expressed through his writing, specifically through the character Pip (Sanders 298).
In Great Expectations, Pip has a profound soliloquy where he tries to explain the effects of injustices and how it becomes detrimental to everyone, yet especially children.
In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. (Dickens 64)
This passage is vital to the comprehension of injustice because it illustrates the purity of children, and how even the smallest injustice can act as a vital event that forms their life.
Like Dickens, Pip is able to triumph over his injustices to achieve success. Both realize that hard work is their only means to do that. With Pip, that entails getting a job in the East, while for Dickens it was his literary career. Writing Great Expectations provided an adult escape for his pent-up feelings of injustice. By creating a character like Pip, Dickens was able to work out such feelings in a way he could not in his own life. Fictionalizing his personal experiences enabled Dickens to face his past in a safe way. He did not have to confront the people and events that shaped him directly; he could do it through characters such as Pip (Leacock 52).
Discrimination of Class
The personification of Dickens through Pip is masterfully done, with details outlining his stature in class, specific and in-depth. Social class back then was indicative of how one was perceived and treated (Sanders 128). Living through the Industrial Revolution allowed Dickens to witness the classifying of people through wealth, and also the discrimination of those who were not financially stable. Growing up with a father in financial debt, Dickens faced prejudice from the wealthy middle-class and perceived them as snobby, and morally corrupt. Dickens's loathing of the wealthy was well known to the public as seen in many of the research on him (Sanders 120).
his middle-class distaste for the assumptions of the upper classes of his day...gave him a profound distrust of aristocratic assumptions, rights, and privileges. (Sanders 119)
His pre-conceived notions of the wealthy led him to portray that stereotype in Great Expectations in hoping that society would learn from their immoral attitudes. Dickens also depicts the lower class in a better light than perceived by the rest of society (Epstein 205).
In order to reveal the real side of the lower class to society, Dickens used his well known status as an author to convey his own feelings toward the public. Dickens's motive was to not only educate society of the reality of social class, but to also help them realize that no matter the class no one has the upper hand in life (Epstein 206).
the forceful presence of the lower classes in Dickens's novels reflects and foreshadows their increasing power in society itself [...] "Dickens stuck to the simple proposition that no class had a monopoly on smarts or morality or decency or humour." (Epstein 207)
Through Great Expectations Dickens was able to defend the lower class, and also express a form of retribution on the upper class by portraying them as snobby. The public loved Dickens for his efforts as quoted in one of the many books on Dickens: "In Dickens the poor found a champion who portrayed them as they wished to be seen" (Epstein 208). This shows the positive effect that Dickens had on society through his works as an author.
Though Dickens grew up with the notion that the upper class were made up of snobby people who thought of the lower class as uneducated, and daft, he was able to realize that you cannot judge a person by their class, and therefore tried to rectify this in his writings (Sanders 131). Dickens wrote Great Expectations partly to portray the ghastly behaviour of the upper class, and to illustrate the lower class as good and educated people in order to even the playing field. Dickens's true feelings on society were shown through Great Expectations, and its effects were celebrated everywhere (Sanders 160).
The works of Dickens are provocative, especially that of the Great Expectations. Dickens portrays the themes of overcoming poverty, love, and injustice by incorporating his life into his work. Although it is classified as one of Dickens's most incredible works, the basis of the storyline would have never developed if Dickens never encountered the events in his life as they were. Evidently, Great Expectations was used as a release mechanism, in which Dickens freed his underlying emotions of love, injustice and poverty through the character of Pip.
This is the complete article, containing 2,293 words
(approx. 8 pages at 300 words per page).
