The pressure of touring and the effort of public readings put a great strain on Dicken’s health and the doctor’s advised him to stop. He ignored them and he died in 1870 after collapsing at Gad’s Hill.
When Charles Dickens was born the majority of the population lived in the countryside, but the industrial revolution, which had been underway for about sixty years, led to the rapid growth of cities. In the cities the housing available to the poor was often apalling. So while the majority of the population worked long hours in dangerous factories before going home to squalor the wealthy few percent lived in luxury.
A similar situation in France had led to revolution in 1789 and Britain had been at war with the armies of revolutionary France for nineteen years by the time Charles Dickens was born. This war was to continue for three years until Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. Fearing regime in their own country, the British government maintained a very harsh regime. People could be imprisoned without trial, the army was called in to deal with any public gatherings which may become unruly,
public executions were very common and transportation to the colonies was used frequently. Most of those transported to New South Wales in Australia were poor, uneducated people accused of theft. Those who suffered the punishment were never meant to return home. The theme of transportation is integral to the plot of Great Expectations.
The 1800s were years of great prosperity for some in Britain. The new wealth generated by industry and the colonies was shared out among a privileged. The gap between the rich and the poor grew and there was a definite divide between the upper and working classes.
Dickens was very interested in bringing about change and his novels deal with such topics as justice and punishment, the harsh treatment of children and the evils of the factory system. He was an ardent campaigner against public executions, using his fame and influence to bring the horrors of the situation to light.
Social change did occur during the lifetime of Charles Dickens. Hew laws were passed to lessen the hours endured by factory workers; young children were prevented from working in factories altogether and The Public Health Act of 1848 made the first step towards improved sanitation and public health.
Great Expectations is set slightly before Charles Dickens lived.
The first chapter of Great Expectations takes place in a graveyard. A young boy, Pip is observing his dead family’s coffins. He is an orphan and lives with his grown-up sister. He is lonely, he “never saw (his) father or (his) mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them.” and he recalls that, when he was young he used to imagine what they looked like from the appearance of the lettering on their tombstones. “The shape of the letters on (his) father’s gave (him) an odd idea that he was a square,stout, dark man, with curly black hair.” And he “drew a childish conclusion that (his) mother was freckled and sickly from the character and turn of the inscription” on her tombstone. We know that all his brothers are dead because beside his parents’ graves are “five little stone lozenges arranged in a neat row.” Because of this he imagined “that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouser pockets”.
The loneliness and spookiness is heightened by the fact that this scene takes place “on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.” The marshes are described as a “dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it.” And the river is described, rather depressingly, as a “low leaden line”. The sea is made to seem likewise scary and spooky by being described as a “distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing.” And, to reinforce Pip’s fear and loneliness, he is described as a “small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry.
Pip is then accosted by the convict. The convict, whose name is Magwich initially says “Hold your noise! Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat”. When he says this his voice is described as terrible. He is then described. Even his clothes incite darkness and spookiness, he is dressed “in coarse grey”. We know he is a convict because he has “a great iron on his leg.” He has “no hat, broken shoes, and an old rag tied round his head.” He has been “soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints and stung by nettles, and torn by briars.” So already it I clear he is an escaped convict. He is very threatening, he “glared and growled.” He was also ill, he’s limping, shivering and when he seized Pip by the chin his “teeth chattered in his head.”
Then, after threatening Pip a little more, Magwich “turned (Pip) upside down, and emptied (his) pockets”. This makes Pip see the Church “go head over heels before (him) and (he) saw the steeple under (his) feet.” Magwich finds nothing but a piece of bread in Pip’s pocket which he eats “ravenously”. This shows that he is extremely hungry for some substantial food and is not of any class because he eats with no manners, which is further described later in the book, where Magwich is said to seem “more like a man who is putting (food) away somewhere in a violet hurry, than a man who was eating it.”
Although later in the book Magwich is revealed to be a good man, he does nothing but scare and threaten Pip at this point. he comments on Pip’s fat cheeks, as if he wants to eat them and then, instead of simply asking whO Pip lives with he says “Who d’ye live with – supposin’ you’re kindly let to live, which I hadn’t made up my mind about?” of course Magwich probably has no intention of killing Pip, but Pip doesn’t know that, and if he wasn’t scared of Magwich then he may well refuse to do his bidding. The bidding in question is to fetch his a file and “wittles”. If Pip doesn’t do this, Magwich threatens to “have (Pip’s) heart and liver out”. All the threatening works, and Pip is “dreadfully frightened”. This is not enough though, and Magwich goes on to scare Pip even further by telling him of an imaginary friend he has a young man in comparison with which (he) is an angel. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that man. A boy may think he is safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open.” Magwich then goes on to explain how he will set the young man on Pip if Pip doesn’t do as he asks. This of course petrifies poor Pip and he agrees, when they part company he is clearly very scared because he falters when trying to say goodnight “G-good night, sir.” Magwich replies to this by agreeing that the night is indeed good, because it’s dark and it woulod be much harder for the authorities to find him. He also adds “I wish I was a frog. Or a eel.” After he says this there is another reference to the fact that, no mater how threatening, he is cold and unwell because “he hugged his shudeering body in both his arms – clasping himself, as if to hold himself together – and limped towards the low church wall. As (Pip) saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds.” It is then revealed that perhaps Magwich is just as frightened and vulnerable as Pip as he “Looked into (Pip’s) young eyes as if he were eluding that hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.”. As Magwich gets further away his legs seem “numbed and stiff”, he is “still hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the marshes here and there.”
The chapter concludes by saying “The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed.” All this imagery signifies Pip’s dread. Pip then starts to think of Magwich as a pirate come to life, this scares him and he “ran home without stopping”.
