Explore the initial presentation of Dickens Magwitch and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations

The first 200 words of this essay...

Explore the initial presentation of Dickens' Magwitch and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel written by Charles Dickens, the most popular English novelist of the Victorian Era. It was published as a serial edition in his magazine named 'All the Year Round' on a weekly basis to increase its sales and to make it more available to the public. Like most of his novels there exists a concern for social reform, through which Dickens conveys and expresses his own opinions of the Victorian social system. Through his presentation of characters, Dickens demonstrates that Victorian society revolved around social class and how individuals judged others based on their class, status and appearance, doing so by satirising Victorian society. The protagonist of the novel is named Pip, and like the young Dickens, dreams of becoming a gentleman. Dickens' father was imprisoned for bad debt which may have been the stimulation of the escaped convict Magwitch. Before his father's imprisonment, Dickens had the good-fortune of being sent to a boarding school at the age of nine, where Dickens got a taste of the upper-class, and most probably where his dreams of becoming a gentleman developed.