How does Dickens present childhood in Great Expectations?

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‘How does Dickens present childhood in ‘Great Expectations’?

A tough childhood was typical for a child living in the Victorian period, and that’s only if a baby survived till childhood – as infant mortality rates were extremely high. This is an experience Pip – our protagonist – knows well, as all five of his brothers are dead, buried in the graveyard at the beginning of the book alongside his parents. Pip and his sister – Mrs Joe Gargery – are the only survivors. If a child does survive, he or she would expect a life of child labour as education was not compulsory – and even those who went to school had to deal with a lot of corporal punishment. Pip himself is will one day be the apprentice of a blacksmith – Joe Gargery, “When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe”. Pip says “I was to be”, implying he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. This sort of treatment children must endure affects the readers on an emotional level as nowadays children are seen as weak and innocent. In the Victorian period, it was always ‘survival of the fittest’. The government did not give benefits or help as we come to expect now and so there was little chance of an orphan making something of himself like Pip does – something that must have been quite surreal to Victorian era readers. The Victorian period was also very capitalist – a very individualistic ethos of an economy that made people believe it’s their fault if you’re in poverty – further playing on why people couldn’t pull themselves up from the dirt in the way Pip would do.

Dickens’ main interests as a writer would be to entertain as well as to gain recognition to be successful and make money. However, Dickens was very much a ‘people’s writer’, meaning that he listened to the praises and criticisms of his readers, and did more of or improved, respectively. Also, he wrote this novel in a serial. With weekly instalments – making it much easier to receive criticisms and act upon them. Dickens did not cater to any specific group or social class, his work was published in newspapers or journals that everyone read from. Another very famous novel courtesy of Dickens is Oliver Twist. There are some stark similarities between both Great Expectations and Oliver Twist; such as how both Pip and Oliver are both orphans, they both have interactions with convicts at an early age and most of all – in both novels, the protagonists want an escape from the misery in their lives. This book very much belongs to a ‘hybrid genre’ as it contains elements of many genres such as action, romance, and adventure, and to a lesser degree: comedy and thriller. Dickens’ style of writing – such as caricature and the constant portrayal of squalid and poverty-stricken settings in his novels – became known as ‘Dickensian’.

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Pip’s upbringing and life is not at all uncommon for a child of the Victorian era. Pip has lost both parents and five of six siblings. His sister is left to raise him and she did so very harshly. She frequently reminds him by using the phrase “...brought you up by hand”, to remind him that not only did she raise him by herself, she did so with strict discipline. This is further shown by the fact that his sister has named a cane ‘tickler’ so that Pip knows what is coming when she utters the name. Mrs Joe Gargery ...

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