The Social Aspects Of Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Dickens’s Great Expectations could be considered by some to be semi-autobiographical, since, like the main character of the novel, Pip, Dickens had a very humble beginning. While he and his character bear many similarities, Dickens’s main focus in the novel is addressing the social aspects of his time, rather than telling the story of his life.

Charles Dickens was the second of eight children born to Elizabeth and John Dickens in Portsmouth, England in 1812. His father worked as a clerk in the pay office of the royal dockyard in London with little pay. As a result of the family’s rising expenses and small income, John Dickens was sent to debtor’s prison in 1824, forcing a twelve-year-old Charles to work in a blacking factory to pay off his father’s debt. As the nineteenth century developed and the Industrial Revolution continued to change the nature of commerce in England, Charles developed higher hopes for himself and was inspired by his family’s situation to “promulgate his ideas of social justice to improve education for the common people and their health, morale, and general welfare" (Newlin). Dickens eventually leaves the factory to finish off his schooling and starts a career as a freelance reporter of law cases where he later becomes a parliamentary reporter by 1831. He publishes his first short story in 1833 and joins the Morning Chronicle as a writer/reporter in 1834, which widens the opportunity for him to criticize “aspects of contemporary British culture that [trouble] him, like Victorian standards of education, the legal system, or crime and British prisons” (Markley). His observations can be seen in Great Expectations like, for example, when Pip visits the Newgate Prison in London. Events like these in the earlier ...

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...y for understanding the place of women in Victorian culture and their role in Victorian fiction by studying the women in this novel” (Markley). The sweet and gentle Biddy, who is able to guess the identity of Mrs. Joe's attacker, and who sees more clearly than anyone the painful effects of Pip's selfish expectations, and Molly, the mysterious woman who had been unwilling to suffer the humiliation of her husband Magwitch's infidelity without a fight. The most notable and important aspect, however is the misunderstanding of the relationship between social class and self-worth. Dickens addresses this through Pip’s belief that his great expectations are a result of him be destined to be a higher class than he is, but the main takeaway from the novel comes from Pip’s realization that great expectations come from the people who bring them up to achieve great things.