scholarly journals Depiction of Victorian Era in the Novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. p17
Author(s):  
Farhana Haque

Charles Dickens’ Great Expectation actually did reflect the Victorian society and therefore the morality of that era’s people inside of the novel. Since we know that Victorian era basically present some features such as virtue, strength, thrift, manners, cleanliness, honesty and chastity. These are the morals that Victorian people used to hold with high esteem. In this novel Great Expectations, Dickens has created some Victorian characters whom we have seen both in good working way or not at all. But the protagonist named Pip was dynamic and he went through some several changes and dealt with different and significant moral issues. Somehow Pip left behind all the values he was raised with. Because Miss Havisham and Estella have corrupted Pip with rich life. Greed, beauty and arrogance were his ingredient of immoral life. The other characters like Joe and Biddy were static characters throughout the entire novel and became noticeable to be the manifestation of what we call as ideal Victorians. The main heroin of this novel was Estella with whom Pip thought he had some love connection. Hence, Estella has been presented as a good in the sense of potentiality and turned morally bad. Miss Havisham, who was basically a corrupt woman and she engraved the center of the novel. Great Expectations did disclose how was the situation of Victorian society through some important features such as higher class, corrupted judicial system between rural and urban England. Here in this novel, Dickens was concern about the education system in Victorian era where the lower class people get less opportunities of getting proper education. From the beginning to the end of this novel, Dickens explored some significant issues regarding higher and lower class system of Victorian society which did fluctuate from the greatest woeful criminal named Magwitch to the needy people of the swamp country, where Joe and Biddy were the symbol of that regime. After that we can proceed to the middle class family where Pumblechook was the person to represent that regime. Last but not the least Miss Havisham symbolized and bear flag of very rich and sophisticated Victorian woman who has represented the higher class society in the novel Great Expectations. Hence we can say Great Expectations has talked and displayed the class system of Victorian England and the characters of this novel therefore also did uphold the true reflection of Victorian era.

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-30
Author(s):  
Muna Shrestha

My thesis argues that Charles Dickens reflects the capitalist psychology of mid Victorian London in his novel Great Expectations. It is fully narrated in the first person and a time conquering master piece of Charles Dickens. In this novel, he touches on expectations in the life of diverse characters, the greatest of which being the expectation of Pip, the central character of the novel and also his moves from childhood to adulthood. He portrays how difficult it is for a lower class person to become a gentleman. The life for the upper class is easy but the life for the lower class is hard and painful in Victorian England. He vividly represents the existing picture of the society working in the minds of various characters and their expectations. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection and the eventual triumph of good over evil.The purpose of this study is to describe the writer’s view of capitalism and its consequences such as ending of family units, illness, mutual exploitation, human passions, expectations and selfishness through character and plot.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ-tls for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Saed Jamil Shahwan

The novel, Great Expectation (1861) revolves around the universal theme of love and conflict, which influences the protagonist, Pip. Many critics have commented on the plot and background of the novel. The main aim of this study is to reveal various instances projecting kindness and sympathy in between the social conflict and social tension at the background of the novel “Great Expectation. The study will focus on the concept of kindness towards others which has been incorporated throughout the story of the novel between the narrator and the characters. Charles Dickens (1812- 1870) has shed light upon the theme of social mobility, manners, social injustice and prospect towards tangible reality. This study answers the question whether Dickens could be able to reflect the concept of kindness in the novel or not? Moreover, it will search whether the concept of kindness has been explored well in the story of the novel that it contains probable educational contents of kindness for research. To prove that, the article will explore various aspects of kindness, which has been observed during the course of the novel. The study would be based on qualitative research method from secondary resources. The aspect of kindness would be analyzed and highlighted through multiple scenes from the novel. The study would be concluded on the point where Dickens stresses on the dialect for up gradation of social status in Pip in order to establish himself as a desired partner of Estella despite having a social difference of class during the Victorian period.


2020 ◽  
Vol V (II) ◽  
pp. 54-61
Author(s):  
Arshad Ali ◽  
Athar Rashid ◽  
Ameer Sultan

The present work deals with the adjectives used by Charles Dickens to portray the social class in the novel Great Expectations. The study used a corpus linguistics methodology for data preparation, corpus development, and data analysis. The text of the novel was collected from online sources and used in the compilation of the corpus. The corpus was filtered of additional information and tagged using a part-of-speech tagger (POS tagger). The tagged data was analyzed using AntConc software. The findings of the study suggest that the use of adjectives plays a substantial role in the portrayal of the social class in the novel Great Expectations. The findings also show that there was a clear divide between upper and lower classes. The members of the lower class were humiliated and looked down upon by the members of the upper class.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 506-517
Author(s):  
Nurul Imansari

The study object in this research is the representation of social class in the illustration of Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens (1895). Social class is one of the most prominent themes raised by Charles Dickens in his work to satirize the condition of Victorian England as a form of empathy towards the lower class people. Dickens tries to portray that phenomenon into a series of story and illustration of people’s everyday life in his work ‘Sketches by Boz’. However, this social phenomenon is always depicted and discussed mostly in term of the narration form. On the contrary, illustration is often being ignored. The aim of this study is to bring together the importance of illustration in its relationship to the text. The method used in this study was a descriptive qualitative. It will examine how social class is portrayed in the illustration of Dickens’ Sketches by Boz by focusing particularly on the variety of techniques used by the illustrators in producing the illustrations. The result shows that both narration and illustration highlights the social class reality in the Victorian era. The narration and the illustration cannot be separated in Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz since it is created to be a description of people’s everyday life in Victorian London. Keywords: Charles Dickens, Illustration, Narration, Social Class


The late 1990s – early 2000s was a time of numerous projects dedicated to the Victorian age and the Victorian novel as a specific phenomenon that inspires the modern novel development. The English postmodern novel with its typical narrative, time transferal to Victorian England, weaving of time layers, invokes current research interest. The relevance of this study is caused by considerable interest of researchers in the Victorian era heritage and by need of a comprehensive study of Victorian linguoculture and its implementation in the modern English novel. The Victorian text influences a new genre of the novel that reflects the gravity of modern English prose to the traditional literature of Victorian era, assumed to be particularly important in this context. The analysis of A. S. Byatt’s “Possession” in the Russian literary criticism was made only by O. A. Tolstykh; in the Ukrainian science, this work was investigated by O. Boynitska in the context of searching the past, so this subject is not investigated enough, and in our opinion is new and relevant, especially from the perspective of the “Victorian era” concept embodied in the novel. The aim of the paper is to analyze the “Victorian era” concept peculiarities in the intercultural context, on the basis of A. S. Byatt’s “Possession” as a Victorian novel. The paper takes into account the reproduction of concepts of Marriage, Home, Family, Freedom, Life, as components of “Victorian era.” The Victorian family is often represented through the place of their dwelling; therefore, the great Victorians’ works are overwhelmed by interior descriptions (Dombey’s house, Miss Havisham’s home, Mr. Rochester’s Castle). However, in “Possession,” there is an obvious contrast of Victorian buildings to the same structures in the XX century: the past prime – the modern decline. All the secrets and delusions hidden behind the facades of supposedly respectable buildings result in distorting facts and, to some extent, to violating the rights of ownership to the memories of the past. This gives another meaning to the title of the novel – “possession,” that is ownership, possession of letters, memory, truth.


Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-135
Author(s):  
Irena Avsenik Nabergoj

This article deals with literary depictions of social, political, cultural and religious circumstances in which children who have lost one or both parents at birth or at a later age have found themselves. The weakest members of society, the children looked at here are exposed to dangers, exploitation and violence, but are fortunate enough to be rescued by a relative or other sympathetic person acting out of benevolence. Recognizing that the relationship between the orphaned child, who is in mortal danger, and a rescuer, who most frequently appears unexpectedly in a relationship, has been portrayed in narratives throughout the ages and that we can therefore speak of it as being an archetypal one, the article focuses especially on three novels by Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist (1837–1839), David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860–1861) – and in Fugitive Pieces (1996) by Canadian writer Anne Michaels. Charles Dickens earned the reputation of a classic writer through his original literary figures of orphaned children in the context of the rough capitalism of the Victorian era of the 19th century. Such originality also distinguishes Anne Michaels, whose novel Fugitive Pieces portrays the utterly traumatic circumstances that a Jewish boy is exposed to after the Germans kill his parents during the Holocaust. All the central children’s lives in these extreme situations are saved by generous people, thus highlighting the central idea of both selected authors: that evil cannot overcome good. Rescuers experience their selfless resolve to save extremely powerless and unprotected child victims of violence from life-threatening situations as a self-evident moral imperative. Through their profound and deeply experienced descriptions of memories of traumas successfully overcome by central literary figures in a spirit of compassion and solidarity, Charles Dickens and Anne Michaels have left testaments of hope against hope for future generations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Askar Nur

This research discusses about culture reproduction in the Charles Dickens’ novel “Great Expectations” and aims to find out the process of culture reproduction in the novel Great Expectations. The researcher used culture reproduction (habitus and field concept) theory of Pierre-Felix Bourdieu. This research focuses on culture reproduction occurred in Great Expectations. The data were analyzed using a descriptive qualitative method to identify, describe and analyze the data that found in the novel Great Expectations. The researcher used coding sheet as the instrument to find out the valid data. This research conducted to answer the problems that concerning how the culture reproduction occurred in the novel. The findings show that there are some phenomena which supported the process of culture reproduction occurred according to Bourdieu, as following the phenomena of culture reproduction in the old and new culture based on habitus and field concept and its dialectical relation. The researcher concludes that the dialectical relation between old and new habitus, the old and new arena (field) or between unwillingness to return to old life and also unwillingness to live in new life makes Pip get in a new phase of life by bringing his old culture and current culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-314
Author(s):  
Galina T. Bezkorovaynaya ◽  
Luiza N. Gishkaeva ◽  
Natalia T. Pakhsarian

The article concerns the language units, forming the semantics of festivities in one of the most popular works by Charles Dickens - the great English writer of Victorian Era, namely A Christmas Carol (1843). This work has been the subject for a lot of research, the story however is not investigated within the framework of some allied sciences. An attempt to use linguistic, linguistic culture and literary criticism approaches has been made to analyze the story. The eleven theme groups were found and the linguistic units were picked up. Those units create the unique picture of Christmas festivities. The examples from the text are analyzed. Around one thousand language units describing Christmas are analyzed. The conclusion is made that the writer created the morally important, educating work. At the same time, he attracted attention to Christmas in Britain, criticizing the drawbacks of the society as well as in Victorian England. The palette of stylistic and language means is rich and wonderful.


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