Great Expectations Setting Essay

My mother often told my sisters and me stories of her childhood move from Virginia to North Carolina. She’d describe the heartbreak of being ripped away from her home, family, and best friends. Although it was painful in the moment, in hindsight she can honestly say that the move was one of the best things that even happened to her. Here she met the love of her life and gave birth to her three girls. The change of environment impacted her life forever. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens writes of a boy named Pip as he grows and changes as he transitions from his home in the marsh to the hustle and bustle of London. In his novel he proves that our surroundings have a life-changing impact upon us.
As a child, the main character and narrator of Charles Dickens Great Expectations, Pip, was orphaned. The death of his parents resulted in his bitter and often cruel sister adopting him and “raising him by hand.” In the eleventh paragraph of the second chapter, Pip narrates as Mrs. Joe beats him upon his return from the churchyard where his parents are buried. “Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it immediately divined the cause and applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing me-- I often served as a connubial missile—at Joe” (9). Pip grew up in the lowland east of London in Northern Kent. The marshlands add a very dark and dank feel to the novel, and frighten young Pip, as show in the very beginning of the novel when Dickens writes, “… the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip” (4). The lack of love from his sister, the lack of parents to nurture him, along with the ominous environment in which he grew up in, likely resulted in...

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Ultimately, Pip will become the grown man who narrates the novel. In the reminiscent passages scatters throughout part one, we can see that Pip will learn that social status does not define who you are and that his actions have had negative impacts upon the people who love him. And just like my mother came to realize the impact that moving to North Carolina has had upon her life, Pip will to realize that he changed in respond to the situation surrounding him, which is reinforced when he says, “How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault, how much Miss Havisham's, how much my sister's, is now of no moment to me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done” ().

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 1868. Print.