Great Expectations and a Christmas Carol: a True Gentleman

Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol: A True Gentleman According to Dictionary.com, a gentleman is a civilized, educated, sensitive, or well-mannered man. However, by Victorian definition, a gentleman was, perhaps most importantly, a rich man. “Charles Dickens…was an author of relatively humble origins who desired passionately to be recognized as a gentleman, and insisted, in consequence, upon the essential dignity of his occupation” (Victorian Web). In Great Expectations he portrays Pip, a poor boy turned rich through expectations, who must learn what true dignity is. A Christmas Carol, too, reveals Scrooge’s distortion of the gentlemanly role and the dire need to understand genuine goodness. In both Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens shows how two men, Pip and Scrooge, are affected by the social norms of the day; however, when they are guided by righteous people, they find the true meaning of being happy without gentlemanly status or great wealth. From the day he was born, Charles Dickens was apart the social discrimination that came with being a member of the working class. He was born Charles John Huffman Dickens on February 7th, 1812 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England to Elizabeth née Barrow and John Dickens. His father was a clerk at a Navy Pay Office. “John was a congenial man, hospitable and generous to a fault which caused him financial difficulties throughout his life” (Merriman). Charles’ father was a true gentleman in his eyes; however, he was not viewed as such from the world’s point of view because he was not affluent. In 1824 John Dickens was imprisoned for debt and Charles was forced to work to support his family. This was one of the low points in Dickens’ life and he went out of it with a harsh view on the world and dreaded to be of gentlemanly status and wealth, reflected in the character of Pip in Great Expectations (Merriman). Dickens “attacked the cold Victorian compromise” with his portrayal of the true

Cited: Belchem, John and Epstein, James. “The Nineteenth-Century Gentleman Leader Revisited.” Social History (1997): 174-193. JSTOR. Web. 22 March 2013. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Ed. Jill Kriegel. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010. Print. Gilmour, Robin. The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Print. Houston, Gail T. “‘Pip’ and ‘Property’: The (Re)Production of the Self in ‘Great Expectations’.” Studies in the Novel (1992): 13-25. JSTOR. Web. 22 March 2013 Merriman, C.D. “Charles Dickens.” The Literature Network. Jalic, n.d. Web.