Economic anxiety and social mobility. Dickens set the substance of Great Expectations at roughly the time of his own childhood; the action of the novel begins in 1812, the year Dickens was born, when Pip is seven. This was a time of great economic anxiety in England; the American Revolution, Napoleonic wars, and the War of 1812 had caused a drain on the national economy, and industrial developments were putting agricultural as well as other manual laborers out of work. The development of the threshing machine in farming (patented 1788; in widespread use by 1830) and mechanized looms in clothmaking (patented 1786; in widespread use 1815- 1840) were two significant changes in labor practice; both inventions increased production, which led to greater economic security for their owners and managers, but also reduced the need for unskilled laborers, which created unemployment at the lower ends of the economic scale. Manual labor, always a marker of lower social status, was giving way to industrialized forms of doing business, and the new industrial elite was reshaping the English class system.
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