How Does Dickens Introduce the Main Themes and Concerns of the Novel in the Opening Chapters of “Great Expectations”?
How does Dickens introduce the main themes and concerns of the novel in the opening chapters of “Great Expectations”?
“Great Expectations” is a “Tragi-comedy” written by the famous novelist Charles Dickens during the early 19th centaury. It is synonymous with the suffering of real people during the Victorian Era, and it looks at life from the downcast eyes of a small boy unknowingly pitched as an apt pinup boy for the era of poverty and hardship, in harsh juxtaposition with the perspective later on in the novel of a boy with whom the riches of life cling to like moss on an old oak. The novel itself was originally designed to keep Dickens’ weekly magazine, “All year round” in business; to do this he needed a novel that would appeal to all types of readers: those who favoured romance, those who craved mystery and those who loved gruesome horror, those who loved a little bit of excitement and those who wanted easy reading as well as those, like dickens himself, who a objectionable rusted mirror, a book that would change things, signify the hard times. It is this patchwork quilt of genres that the book was supposedly meant to slot into, without losing its moral compass or excitement or plot, that shape the novel into a mismatched mélange of themes, stuck haphazardly together by the glue that makes the very basis of all good reads, a decent writer.
The themes of the book vary and clash but in short they include: self achievement/improvement, justice and betrayal, pride and revenge, crime and guilt, astonishing imagery and of course romance. The aim of this paper is simply to scrutinise these said themes and examine how Dickens introduces them in the early steps of the book, so to start as we mean to continue, let’s begin with examining the very first of these themes, and one could argue the most important or at least the most commonly referred, that of self improvement.
The moral theme of Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty, and conscience
“Great Expectations” is a “Tragi-comedy” written by the famous novelist Charles Dickens during the early 19th centaury. It is synonymous with the suffering of real people during the Victorian Era, and it looks at life from the downcast eyes of a small boy unknowingly pitched as an apt pinup boy for the era of poverty and hardship, in harsh juxtaposition with the perspective later on in the novel of a boy with whom the riches of life cling to like moss on an old oak. The novel itself was originally designed to keep Dickens’ weekly magazine, “All year round” in business; to do this he needed a novel that would appeal to all types of readers: those who favoured romance, those who craved mystery and those who loved gruesome horror, those who loved a little bit of excitement and those who wanted easy reading as well as those, like dickens himself, who a objectionable rusted mirror, a book that would change things, signify the hard times. It is this patchwork quilt of genres that the book was supposedly meant to slot into, without losing its moral compass or excitement or plot, that shape the novel into a mismatched mélange of themes, stuck haphazardly together by the glue that makes the very basis of all good reads, a decent writer.
The themes of the book vary and clash but in short they include: self achievement/improvement, justice and betrayal, pride and revenge, crime and guilt, astonishing imagery and of course romance. The aim of this paper is simply to scrutinise these said themes and examine how Dickens introduces them in the early steps of the book, so to start as we mean to continue, let’s begin with examining the very first of these themes, and one could argue the most important or at least the most commonly referred, that of self improvement.
The moral theme of Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty, and conscience