What Picture Does Charles Dickens Create Of Childhood in Victorian Times?
Great Expectations is set in early Victorian England, a time when great social changes were sweeping the nation. The Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had transformed the social landscape, enabling capitalists and manufacturers to amass huge fortunes. Although social class was no longer entirely dependent on the circumstances of one’s birth, the divisions between rich and poor remained nearly as wide as ever. London, a teeming mass of humanity, lit by gas lamps at night and darkened by black clouds from smokestacks during the day, formed a sharp contrast with the nation’s sparsely populated rural areas. More and more people moved from the country to the city in search of greater economic opportunity. Throughout England, the manners of the upper class were very strict and conservative: gentlemen and ladies were expected to have thorough classical educations and to behave appropriately in innumerable social situations. These conditions defined Dickens’s time, and they make themselves felt in almost every facet of Great Expectations. Pip’s sudden rise from country labourer to city gentleman forces him to move from one social extreme to another while dealing with the strict rules and expectations that governed Victorian England. Ironically, this novel about the desire for wealth and social advancement was written partially out of economic necessity.
Great Expectations opens in a miserable, murky marsh. This ‘bleak place overgrown with nettles’ is where Pip spends most of his time, we can assume this as Pip has spent enough time there to discover an old churchyard. By telling us that this is where pip spends most of his time tells us that Pip receives no education but is still not working and seems to be wasting his life in this ‘marsh country’ which is rotting away, which could symbolise Pip’s decaying life in this environment. Another noticeable fact when we are told this is that there are no buildings and subsequently no people in this marsh, meaning that Pip must be out in this wilderness alone. Loneliness seems to be a major part of Pip’s life at this point in the book. We are then told that Pip is an orphan and that he his mum and dad ‘are buried here’, that is in his private cemetery. All of this information given to us in the first few pages already make us pity this poor little boy. We pity him because his childhood seems to be full of sadness, and indeed he does have a sad and hard childhood and so did many Victorian children as life was much harder and crueller in those days. Childhood was hard in those days because during the first five years of life you were at your weakest, and at this time medicine was not as developed as it is now. Only one in five children born lived to see past five years of age and the rate of death whilst giving birth was two thousand per cent higher than it is nowadays-meaning that many children were born motherless. Pip lost is mother and father early on in his life, as he only knows their names ‘on the authority of the tombstone,’ which means that he did not and still does not feel emotionally attached to them.
