Dickens, one of history's most productive authors, is remembered as a curious picture of playfulness, energy, and stubborn will, a man given to working on three huge books at the same time and dashing off to the English countryside for twelve-mile constitutional walks. In a life that spanned fifty-eight years, Dickens wrote fifteen novels, most of which were over a thousand pages, in addition to countless novellas, stories, articles, sketches and letters. His more popular works include Oliver Twist (1838), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), David Copperfield (1849), Hard Times (1854), and the ever-popular story of Ebenezer Scrooge, "A Christmas Carol" (1943). Great Expectations (1860).
Great Expectations by Denice Van Der Putten
The novel opens in the of England, land raw and wet, where stands alone in a churchyard in front of seven gravestones, under which are buried Pip's mother, father and five younger brothers. The sights of these stones causes Pip to begin crying, and then, to make matters worse, out from between the graves shuffles a growling, malicious and ragged looking man. He's got an iron shackle on one leg, but two good arms, which he uses to turn Pip upside-down, shuddering loose a crust of bread from his pocket. The man places Pip on top of a gravestone and forces down the bread, insisting to know where Pip is from and with whom he lives. Pip points to his village and puts in plain words that he lives with his sister, , and , the blacksmith. After one additional tip upside down, the shackled man demands that Pip should meet him at the Battery tomorrow morning, with a file and some "whittles". He forewarns Pip that he's not alone, that he has a henchman, a inhuman young boy that's hiding among the stones, listening, who will be eager to slash Pip to pieces if he doesn't acquire the whittles and file. That said, the old man hobbles off and Pip watches him heading for the river.
Pip is passionate, romantic, and somewhat unrealistic at heart, and he tends to expect more for himself than is reasonable. Pip also has a powerful conscience, and he deeply wants to improve himself. In this book there are two characters of Pip, Pip the narrator and Pip the actor. Pip as the narrator judges his own past actions extremely insensitively, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but angrily condemning himself for bad ones. As a character, however, Pip’s idealism often leads him to perceive the world rather narrowly, and his drive to simplify situations based on insignificant values leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him. Pip’s main development in the novel may be witnessed as the process of learning to place his natural sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism.
Our initial impression of Magwitch is that he is a fearsome criminal; Magwitch escapes from prison at the beginning of Great Expectations and terrorizes Pip in the cemetery. The kindness Pip shows to him, however, makes a lasting impression on him, and he consequently dedicates himself to making a fortune and using it to progress Pip into a higher social class. Behind the scenes, he becomes Pip’s secret benefactor, funding Pip’s education and luxurious lifestyle.
The moral theme of Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty, and conscience are more important than social development, wealth, and class. Dickens establishes the theme and shows Pip learning this lesson, for the most part by exploring ideas of ambition and self-improvement—ideas that quickly become both the center of the novel and the emotional means that encourages a great deal of Pip’s development. Pip’s yearning for self-improvement is the main source of the novel’s title: because he believes in the prospect of improvement in life, he has “great expectations” about his future.
The theme of crime, guilt, and innocence is discovered throughout the novel mainly through the characters of the convicts and the criminal lawyer Jaggers. Magwitch, for instance, frightens Pip at first purely because he is a convict, and Pip feels guilty for helping him because he is fearful of the police. Driven by his conscience, he helps Magwitch to escape the law and the police. As Pip has learned to trust his conscience and to respect Magwitch’s hidden character, he has replaced a superficial standard of value with a personal one.
The theme of social class is vital to the novel’s story line and to the eventual moral theme of the book—Pip understands that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty, and inner worth. Pip achieves this understanding when he is finally able to understand that, despite the admiration in which he holds Estella; your social status is in no way connected to your real character. Drummle, for instance, is an upper-class vandal, while Magwitch, a persecuted convict, has a bottomless inner worth.
