Does Charles Dickens Uses To Ensure The Readers Continuing Interest?
How effective are the opening chapters of Great Expectations? Discuss the methods Dickens uses to ensure the readers’ continuing interest.
Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’ was published in 1860 as monthly stories in magazines and newspapers. Dickens’ wrote novels and stories that were seen as social documents which meant that they portrayed what his society was like at the time. The industrial revolution was a time of mass poverty in Britain. There was homelessness, unemployment and massive divisions between the rich and the poor. This was the time when Dickens wrote ‘Great Expectations’ which therefore means it reflected those poverty ridden times. New advances in technology meant that honest workers lost their jobs to machines. No work meant that the lower classes were reduced to live the life of crime where they stole food to eat and goods to make money. The high crime rate led to great injustice and corruption in the court system. Crimes as measly as stealing a loaf of bread could be punished by death if you did not have the money to bribe the courts. The country’s previous prosperity and justified welfare had dropped into complete disarray.
When we are …show more content…
However, as Dickens’ description of him continues, an unexpected feeling of sympathy subtly arises in the reader. The reader feels this when Magwitch is described as ‘A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered...’. The constant use of the word ‘and’ makes all of Magwitch’s woes seem much worse. The reader then begins to see Magwitch as, not a threatening and treacherous man but a man who is in a very desperate situation. In contrary to the evocative description of Magwitch’s desperation, he then goes on to threaten Pip. The reader understands the violence because of the urgency of his
Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’ was published in 1860 as monthly stories in magazines and newspapers. Dickens’ wrote novels and stories that were seen as social documents which meant that they portrayed what his society was like at the time. The industrial revolution was a time of mass poverty in Britain. There was homelessness, unemployment and massive divisions between the rich and the poor. This was the time when Dickens wrote ‘Great Expectations’ which therefore means it reflected those poverty ridden times. New advances in technology meant that honest workers lost their jobs to machines. No work meant that the lower classes were reduced to live the life of crime where they stole food to eat and goods to make money. The high crime rate led to great injustice and corruption in the court system. Crimes as measly as stealing a loaf of bread could be punished by death if you did not have the money to bribe the courts. The country’s previous prosperity and justified welfare had dropped into complete disarray.
When we are …show more content…
However, as Dickens’ description of him continues, an unexpected feeling of sympathy subtly arises in the reader. The reader feels this when Magwitch is described as ‘A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered...’. The constant use of the word ‘and’ makes all of Magwitch’s woes seem much worse. The reader then begins to see Magwitch as, not a threatening and treacherous man but a man who is in a very desperate situation. In contrary to the evocative description of Magwitch’s desperation, he then goes on to threaten Pip. The reader understands the violence because of the urgency of his