Great Expectations - A key theme in the novel is that of pride and revenge - What is the outcome of Miss Havisham's desire for revenge?

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Great Expectations:

A key theme in the novel is that of pride and revenge. What is the outcome of Miss Havisham’s desire for revenge?

Charles John Huffam Dickens. An English novelist and one of the most popular writers in the history of literature. Dickens combined storytelling, humour and irony with sharp social criticism of people and places, both real and imagined.

Dickens was born February 7th 1812, in Portsmouth. He spent most of his childhood in London and Kent, both of which appear frequently in his novels. He started school at the age of nine, but his education was sadly ended when his father, an amiable but careless minor civil servant, was imprisoned for debt in 1824.

 Dickens was then forced to support himself by working in a shoe-polish factory. It was then he grew a sense humiliation and abandonment, one, which would haunt him for the rest of his life.

As you can see so far, Dickens has had quite a traumatic life, this may be the reason for his ambitions to become a success.

He later described this experience, only slightly altered, in his novel David Copperfield (1849-1850). From 1824 to 1826, Dickens attended school. However, he was mostly self-educated. His favourite books were those by such great 18th-century novelists as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, and their influence can be noticed in Dickens's own novels. In 1827 Dickens took a job as a legal clerk. After learning shorthand writing, he began working as a reporter in the courts and at Parliament, perhaps his job helped him develop the power of precise description, this probably aided him when writing as it made his creative writing so remarkable and detailed.

In December 1833 Dickens published the first of a series of original descriptive sketches of daily life in London. A London publisher commissioned a volume of similar sketches to accompany illustrations by the celebrated artist George Cruikshank. The success of this work allowed Dickens to marry Catherine Hogarth in 1836. This led to the proposal of a similar publishing venture in collaboration with the popular artist Robert Seymour. When Seymour committed suicide, another artist took his place called H. K. Browne, also known as Phiz, who took over drawing the pictures for most of Dickens's later works.

Dickens transformed this project from a set of loosely connected stories into a comic narrative, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). The success of this first novel made Dickens famous and Dickens became a well-known and respected name. At the same time it influenced the publishing industry in Great Britain, being issued in a rather unusual form of inexpensive monthly instalments.

Dickens maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels. A man of enormous energy and wide talents, he also engaged in many other activities. He edited the weekly periodicals Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1870), composed the travel books American Notes (1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846), administered charitable organisations, and pressed for many social reforms. In 1842 he lectured in the United States in favour of an international copyright agreement and in opposition to slavery.

 In 1843 he published A Christmas Carol, a children's story. Dickens's activities also included managing a theatrical company that performed in front of Queen Victoria in 1851. All these successes, however, were shadowed by his domestic life. Incompatibility and Dickens's relations with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, led to his separation from his wife in 1858, after the marriage had produced ten children. He suffered a fatal stroke on June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey five days later.

As Dickens writing matured, his novels developed from comic tales based on the adventures of a central character, like The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby (1837-1838), to works of great social relevance (rich and poor divides). Among his works are Bleak House (1852-1853), Little Dorritt (1855-1857), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865). He also wrote the famous book Oliver Twist (1837-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), Dombey and Son (1846-1848),  Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished, 1870).

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As you can see, dickens was an extremely ambitious man with enormous talent.

But all these aspirations and ambitions to become successful were slightly influenced by the time and place Dickens lived in.

Dickens lived through the industrial revolution, The first Industrial Revolution occurred in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century; it greatly altered Britain's economy and society. The most immediate changes were in the nature of production: what was produced, as well as where and how. Labor was transferred from the production of primary products to the production of manufactured goods and ...

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