Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Victorian Era started in 1837, the year Queen Victoria was crowned. The Industrial Revolution also started in this era. Cities started to form and become heavily populated. In the novel, Great Expectations, Charles Dickens had the main character, Pip, live in two different life styles in the Victorian Era. Pip lived with both the poor and the rich population. Both life styles are very different and placing Pip in both societies helped to show that, while the wealthy people benefited from the industrial revolution, the poor people often paid the price.
The abominable living conditions of the Victorian Era caused many young deaths. The country was so filthy and unorganized; they literally had an open sewage system that flowed through the streets. Pip describes a scene of filth as, “A frouzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had shewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight ; while dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots…” (Dickens, 186).Victorian children were at a high risk of a wide variety of diseases that are easily medicated and controlled in the 21st century. The now curable diseases that were deadly in the Victorian Era were smallpox, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, and dysentery. Death was prevalent in the Victorian households. The younger the children were the more vulnerable to the diseases. This was evident in the book when Pip starts to describe his family. In the novel Pip says, “…they [his brothers] had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence” (Dickens). When Pip mentions this, Dickens is trying to explain th...

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...known as the primogeniture.
The wealthy people had a great advantage over the poor in the industrial revolution. Even though the poor families did most of the work they still had the short end of the stick. Having their young children work in factories coal mines and mill. Having their wives take care of the wealthy children and clean their houses, the men themselves did labor work for the wealthy. Without the natural human instinct to fight for survival the industrial revolution would have ever happened. Money was the soul point in the separation of classes. The wealthier you were the less work you had to do and I their eyes even a better life style even though when they had boring childhood. Pip has lived in both life styles the rich and the poor. The wealthy people of the Victorian era were at a huge advantage, leaving the poor in the worst living conditions.