Criminal Activity and Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, like the majority of Charles Dickens' fiction, contains several autobiographical connotations that demonstrate the author's keen observational talents. Pip, the novel's protagonist, reflects Dickens' painful childhood memories of poverty and an imprisoned father. According to Robert Coles, "there was in this greatest of storytellers an unyielding attachment of sorts to his early social and moral experiences" (566). Complementing Dickens' childhood memories of crime and poverty was his legal training, reflected in the characterizations of lawyers and the abundance of criminal activity that hovers around the world of Great Expectations.
Charles Dickens' father, John, made little money working as a clerk in England's Navy Pay Office (Coles 564). John's low salary, combined with a severe spending problem, would eventually land him in debt. As a consequence, John was placed into debtors' prison. As was the custom of the time, John was forced to bring his family along with him (Coles 564). It was 1824 and young Dickens was only 12 years old (Coles 564). To help his father out of debt, Charles worked under the horrible conditions of a blacking factory (Collins 15). According to Edmund Spenser, quoted in Phillip Collins' Dickens and Crime, these events "lie behind the loneliness, disgrace, and outlawry which pervade all his novels" (15). Collins concurs:
It is a commonplace that his sympathy for suffering and neglected children, which lies at the root of his educational concern, drew much of its strength from the traumatic experience of his own childhood--the period, about his 12th year when the family was in financial straits, ...
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...lodge where some fetter were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison rules, into the interior of the jail. At that time, jails were much neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent all public wrong-doing . . . was still far off . . . and a frouzy, ugly, disorderly depressing scene it was. (246; ch. 32)
In addition to once again demonstrating Dickens's observational talent, this passage illustrates how the author's early memories of prison-life combines with his later knowledge of the Victorian legal and prison system to recreate a vivid and realistic view of Victorian life.
Works Cited
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: Harper, 1990.
Coles, Robert. "Charles Dickens and the Law." Virginia Quarterly Review 59 (1983): 564-586.
Collins, Phillip. Dickens and Crime. New York: St. Martin's, 1962.
The warehouse work at age 12, the humiliating shadow of prison and family debt, questions of money and social rank, and topical issues of law and reform preoccupied him in early life - but they rankled and haunted him through his later years as well, and are present in various forms in all of his writings. In all of these fictional imaginings, drawn from the turmoil of his own life, the reader senses Dickens' compassion for the less fortunate and his desire to find real meaning and substance behind an individual's worth favoured by society, wealth, class, power, and education. Charles Dickens was born in 1812, in Portsmouth, England. He spent his formative years in London, and began his schooling at age nine. In 1824, his father, John, suffered financial difficulties and was stripped of his house by creditors.
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It can be seen through Dickens’s highly successful novel Great Expectations, that his early life events are reflected into the novel. Firstly the reader can relate to Dickens’s early experiences, as the novel’s protagonist Pip, lives in the marsh country, and hates his job. Pip also considers himself, to be too good for his ...
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Shades of Dickens' childhood are repeatedly manifested throughout Great Expectations. According to Doris Alexander, Dickens "knew that early circumstances shape character and that character, in turn, shapes reactions to later circumstances" (3). Not coincidentally, then, the novel is initially set in Chatham and the action eventually moves to London, much like Dickens did himself. The "circumstances" that young Pip experiences a...
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Firstly, the title of Charles Dickens’ work, Great Expectations, directly suggests the idea of a process of anticipation, maturation, and self-discovery through experience as Pip moves from childhood to adulthood. Charles Dickens begins the development of his character Pip as an innocent, unsophisticated orphan boy. Looking at his parent’s tombstone, Pip draws the conclusion: “the shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair” (1). Here, Pip is in a sense self-taught. He does not have much communication with his sister Mrs. Joe Gargery (who adopted him) about the background and history of his parents; in fact, they do not talk much at all about any...
Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations (1861) has great significance to the plot. The title itself symbolizes prosperity and most importantly ambition. The main character and the protagonist, Pip (Philip Pirrip) was born an orphan and hand-raised by his sister Mrs. Gargery and her husband Joe Gargery. Pip was a young boy when he was threatened by a convict, Magwitch, at his parents’ grave to aid him. Pip nervously agreed to lend him a hand and was haunted day and night of the sin he committed which involved stealing food and tools from his Mr. and Mrs. Gargery’s house. Later on, he is called for at the Satis Manor by a rich woman, Miss Havisham. There he met a beautiful young girl, Estella, to whom Pip falls in love with. The novel being divided into three volumes, Pips great expectations arise soon after visiting the Satis Manor.