Charles Dickens was
born on February 7, 1812,
and spent the first nine years of his life living in the coastal regions
of Kent, a county in southeast England. Dickens’s father, John,
was a kind and likable man, but he was incompetent with money and
piled up tremendous debts throughout his life. When Dickens was
nine, his family moved to London. When he was twelve, his father
was arrested and taken to debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother moved
his seven brothers and sisters into prison with their father, but
she arranged for the young Charles to live alone outside the prison
and work with other children pasting labels on bottles in a blacking
warehouse (blacking was a type of manufactured soot used to make
a black pigment for products such as matches or fertilizer). Dickens
found the three months he spent apart from his family highly traumatic.
Not only was the job itself miserable, but he considered himself
too good for it, earning the contempt of the other children. After
his father was released from prison, Dickens returned to school.
He eventually became a law clerk, then a court reporter, and finally
a novelist. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, became
a huge popular success when Dickens was only twenty-five. He published
extensively and was considered a literary celebrity until his death
in 1870.
Many of the events from Dickens’s early life are mirrored
in Great Expectations, which, apart from David
Copperfield, is his most autobiographical novel. Pip, the
novel’s protagonist, lives in the marsh country, works at a job
he hates, considers himself too good for his surroundings, and experiences
material success in London at a very early age, exactly as Dickens
himself did. In addition, one of the novel’s most appealing characters,
Wemmick, is a law clerk, and the law, justice, and the courts are
all important components of the story.
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 laborer 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. Dickens’s magazine, All
the Year Round, had become extremely popular based on the
success of works it had published in serial, such as his own A
Tale of Two Cities and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman
in White. But it had experienced a decline in popularity
after publishing a dull serial by Charles Lever called A
Day’s Ride. Dickens conceived of Great Expectations as
a means of restoring his publication’s fortunes. The book is still immensely
popular a century and a half later.
In form, Great Expectations fits a pattern
popular in nineteenth-century European fiction: the bildungsroman,
or novel depicting growth and personal development, generally a
transition from boyhood to manhood such as that experienced by Pip.
The genre was popularized by Goethe with his book Wilhelm
Meister (1794–1796)
and became prevalent in England with such books as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and
Dickens’s own David Copperfield. Each of these
works, like Great Expectations, depicts a process
of maturation and self-discovery through experience as a protagonist
moves from childhood to adulthood.
