Victorian Childhood
Dickens portreys Pip’s childhood similarly to that of a classic working class victorian child. During the victorian era, many poor people often married young, perhaps when still in their teens. Many also followed Queen Victoria’s example and took pride in rearing large families, some mothers liked to have a new baby each year. Others, were forced to parent large families to make some kind of income. This resulted in children as young as three or four years old slaving away in coal mines and cotton mills causing many children to die at a young age from over work and fatal accidents. Other causes were filthy living conditions and extremely poor medical care. For many poor, working class children, childhood or even life itself did not last long as they were forced to grow up quickly to survive.
The victorians saw the discipline of their children as a very important issue. Many adults believed that children were ‘ born full of wickedness’ and had to be ‘beaten to make them obedient’. Dickens shows this in Great Expectations with references to the beating of Pip. Pip’s sister repeatedly reminds everyone, and anyone who will listen, that she has “brought Pip up by hand” suggesting that she beats him “... she had brought me up ‘by hand’” “... knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband aswell as upon me.” Victorian children were forced to be obedient and withdrawn. They loved their parents un-doubtedly but sometimes only because they knew that they should. Because of the strict discipline kept by fathers in victorianhouseholds, many childen grew to fear their elders greatly.
Despite this, Pip loves his sister’s husband Joe Gargery dearly and holds an awful lot of respect for him. Pip describes Joe as a “ mild,good natured, sweet-tempered,easy-going,foolish dear fellow”. Pip felt close to Joe because of the way they were both treated by Pip’s sister, they seemd to understand eachother and in a sense could relate to eachother’s suffrage. They had a mutual respect between them and were as Joe says “ evr the best of friends Pip”. In this case the relationship between Joe and Pip is extremely unique, as this bond rarely occured between a child and an adult. Few children felt comfortable around adults, and very few children felt that a fellow adult was an “equal” as Pip did about Joe.
Victorian Education
Education in Victorian times, was scarcely available. Education cost money. Wealthy people could afford to hire a governess or a tutor to teach their children at home. When older, their sons would be sent to boarding schools such as Eton or Rugby. This is the type of education that may have been available to Herbert and the Pocket family.
Poor people also had to pay to send their children to school, few working class families could afford this. In 1846, clever pupils were used in public schools as teachers, some as young as ten years old. It wasn’t until 1880 that laws were passed demanding that every child betwwen the ages of five and ten years had to go to school. It wasn’t until 1891 that elementary schools- schools much like Mr Wosple’s Aunt’s school that Pip attented of an evening, became free to all children of any class. These schools were often overcrowded and lacked the resources needed to learn, the little teaching people did was done using the bible, spelling books or “mangnall’s questions”.
Schools for the poor were opened in the 19th century also, when it ‘ finally became apparent ‘ that children were being ‘ exlcluded ‘ from learning because of their class. This wasn’t necessarily the case. Because children from lower classes had always been deprived of many things, one being an education, but in the 19th century someone decided at last to do something about it. These schools- named ‘ragged schools’ because of their pupils’ appearence, sought out much needed voluntary teachers and raised funds to help children find work and learn basic skills such as reading and writing. The main aim of the ‘ragged schools’ was to provide a basic level of care for the most deprived children.
