Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
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Great Expectations is a novel about a seven-year-old orphan boy called
Pip who lives with his cruel sister and her good-natured husband, the
Blacksmith, Joe Gargery. Pip’s life is changed when Jaggers a London
lawyer tells him that a mysterious benefactor has provided money to
make him a gentleman with ‘great expectations’.
This novel was written in the Victorian times, around the 1850s. The
style of writing in this novel reflects the historical period that it
comes from because the novel has lots of long descriptive sentences.
In the 1800s they had ladies and gentlemen and also hanged people,
whereas today this no longer happens. The class system at this time
was taken very seriously and it was considered wrong to talk to
someone of a different class to you. A common profession in the 1800s
was a Blacksmith; today to be a Blacksmith is quite rare. In the 1800s
Blacksmiths were more essential to everyday life because the main mode
of transport was the horse.
The first paragraph of Great Expectations introduces us to Pip’s
family situation. “I called myself Pip”, this shows that Pip is an
orphan because he named himself. This also tells us that Pip has had
to be self-sufficient and do things for himself that would usually be
done for him as a child.
We learn that Pip is an orphan at the very beginning of the novel.
When Pip is at the graveyard he’s looking at his parents’ gravestone,
this appears to be the primary source of information Pip has about his
family. Throughout the rest of the novel Pip doesn’t appear to have
any other information about his family. On the gravestone is the name
of his father and mother and those of his siblings. “…infant children
of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried…”. This quote shows that
as well as Pip’s parents being dead there were also five of Pip’s
siblings. In the first chapter of the novel we also find out that Pip
lives with his sister and the Blacksmith, Joe Gargery.