Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations focus on the themes of money and social class. In both novels, money plays a significant role in shaping and directing human motives and actions. A direct connection can be...

“Tell me your dreams for a while and I will tell you what you are really like.” Written by E.R. Pfaff in 1868, this proverb posits dreams as authentic manifestations of an individual’s identity and character. It makes two conclusions: 1) dreams...

Biddy is introduced early in Great Expectations and is mentioned regularly throughout, though she is not one of the major characters. She does, however, serve as a constant reminder to Pip of what he is leaving behind and, as she is more of a peer...

Through his novel Great Expectations, Charles Dickens emphasizes the perpetually domineering nature of 19th century England’s uncompromising class structure system. Dickens satirizes the socially vital and inflexible natures of this system through...

In his 1987 study The Way of the World, literary scholar Franco Moretti states that the Bildungsroman “stands out as the most obvious of the (few) reference points available in that irregular expanse we call the “novel””. Indeed, while the reader...

Charles Dickens’ bildungsroman Great Expectations (1913) cannot help but impress upon the reader an overwhelming sense of guilt that permeates the novel at various levels. As the plot unfolds, the characters develop; the sense of guilt, however,...

In the 1861 novel Great Expectations, Charles Dickens tells the story of a poor English boy named Pip who faces a number of complicated situations and characters on his way to becoming a gentleman. Dickens’ writing style, while indicative of the...

As simplistic and politically impartial as Victorian novels and their common familial themes of love and companionship may seem, there is customarily a greater sociopolitical concern inserted within the narrative for the reader of the time to have...

In Great Expectations, the word “taint” describes Pip's soiled conscience and shame for his identity, which he confuses with low class status and physical filth (Dickens 249). Pip's usage of it in the passage about his feeling of 'taint' shows the...

A key theme in both Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations[1] and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles[2] is cruelty. Both authors treat this cruelty in such a way as to expose the flaws of a society in which the powerful, either in terms of...

‘Eating and drinking are valued by Dickens as proofs of sociability and ceremonies of love.’ Discuss the significance of food and meals in the novel Great Expectations.

Throughout the novel Great Expectations, numerous meals which have symbolic...

Within Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Joe Gargery is presented as the epitome of human compassion and kindness, the moral center of the novel. He is a strange mixture of wisdom, stupidity and generosity, being the most human of all the...

“Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.” This quote, often attributed to Einstein, is actually said by many physicists and writers – the oldest confirmed being Ray Cummings in a short story. However, Dickens’s novels have...

We would always look in the darkest places for monsters: under the bed, in the closet, out in the woods where light could never penetrate the trees. We would always let our imagination wander to depict creatures that replicated hairy beasts with...

Since its publication in 1860, Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations has garnered a reputation as one of the most powerful and moving works of the nineteenth century. Great Expectations follows the story of a poor young boy named Pip into his...

Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectation is recognized as one of the most important examples of bildungsroman, that is, a “novel of personal development or education” of its main character (Rau). In this novel, using a first-person narrative,...

Bennett and Royle, in their book `An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory’, state that `the relationship between literature, secrecy and secrets is fundamental1’. In the novels I have chosen, this `fundamental’ dynamic is seen in their...

Evil is prevalent in the world, and is especially evident today with recent mass shootings, sexual harassment, and corrupt governments. Those who partake in ruining others’ lives give up their morality and unfortunately choose to carry out evil....

Charles Dickens often used his narratives as a means to express and commentate on the shortcomings of the society he resided in, and his critiques were often pointedly focused on both the ineptitude of the legal system and the unfulfilling nature...

Guilt represents an important aspect of Pip’s life throughout the novel. The bildungsroman that transforms the innocent boy to a decadent gentleman, then into a truly noble gentleman, shows how such negative ideals resulting into misery can be...

Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations is a story of growth and change throughout the life of young Philip "Pip" Pirrip. Although the novel is based in realism, there are numerous instances where Pip's reality collides with fantasy—he is in...

While both Harper Lee and Charles Dickens have parallels in the way they portray justice and the legal system in their respective novels, there are contrasts in the way they portray both Victorian London and the Deep South in the 20th Century....

As the titles Bleak House and Hard Times suggest, there is an abundance in both of imagery, metaphor, and overarching plot that is unpleasant, rendered in such relishing detail as to suggest that Charles Dickens had, in the words of John Forster,...

Charles Dickens' Hard Times is a bleak book. Its characters are a collection of victims and victimizers, each pitiable or damnable. Of this sorrowful lot, perhaps the most tragic individual is Louisa Gradgrind. Ingrained since childhood with...