Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

In the novel of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, one of the

pivotal characters is a man named Abel Magwitch. To answer the

question of whether this man is a criminal or a victim of society, we

must first establish what a criminal is and what a victim of society

is. A criminal is someone who knowingly breaks the law for

self-gratification. A victim of society is someone who is subjected to

outside influences, and is generally mistreated by society. In the

context of this novel, a victim of society is also someone who has

never been given a chance in life, and has no control over events that

occur involving them. Therefore I am going to try and decide which of

these two ‘categories’ the character of Abel Magwitch falls into.

When we first meet Magwitch in Chapter one our first impressions of

him are not positive. Pip describes him as a ‘fearful man’ with a

‘terrible voice’. Although we learn that he is in a terrible state,

‘smothered in mud and lamed by stones’, with a ‘great iron’ on his

leg, indicating he has obviously escaped prison and is on the run, we

as readers do not feel any sympathy for him. The reason for this is

the fact that he is willing to threaten a young boy, seeming to enjoy

the power he has over him is almost repulsive to us as readers, making

him appear even more harsh. The fact that Magwitch is likened to a

dog, he ‘glared and growled’ at Pip, does not help his case. This

presents him as an animal, and serves only to alienate Magwitch from

the reader. This means that we too share Pips reservations and

suspicions about Magwitch throughout the opening chapters, even though

it is clear that this man is scared, lonely and hungry enough to

thre...

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...me suffering as

Magwitch. This belief would probably have evolved after his trial with

Compeyson, which taught him that the law could be manipulated by

class. This shows that Magwitch did not have many criminal intentions,

and that he was tricked by Compeyson. In a sense Dickens is trying to

show us how real justice can be hard to find. It is because of his low

status and poverty that Magwitch never really had a chance. This shows

how the justice system has been manipulated by society.

Therefore, I think that Magwitch, while having acted like a criminal,

is not to blame for his actions and it could be argued that he is even

remorseful about them. This shows that he is not a criminal, but a

victim of the society he lives in, because he was never given a chance

to prove society wrong and make something of his life, he was just

labelled and left in jail.