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Great Expectations
New Historicism attempts to understand what a text tells us about currents of thought at the time it was written. From this approach, Great Expectations can be seen as a commentary on the rise of...
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Great Expectations
Two instances that illustrate the lack of warmth and personableness of Mr. Jagger occur in the First Stage of Great Expectations when Pip first encounters him, and with Pip's meeting with him in...
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Great Expectations
The name of the town where Pip was born and spent his childhood and youth is not named, but it is modeled after Rochester, a large town in the county of Kent in southeastern England. Rochester,...
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Great Expectations
As in many of his novels, Charles Dickens portrays children as innocent victims of the actions of adults. This is a reflection of his continued bitterness over his being sent to work in a blacking...
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Great Expectations
In Victorian England, the role of women was a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, they were seen as “the angel in the house,” a phrase from a poem of the same name by Coventry Patmore published...
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Great Expectations
Pip’s relationship with Estella begins as playmates, arranged by Miss Havisham. Pip learns eventually that Miss Havisham’s plan is to train Estella to break men’s hearts as a means of revenge...
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Great Expectations
When Joe came to visit Pip in London, Pip was unfriendly and rude to him. It wasn’t until the end of Joe’s visit, when Joe passed on a message that Estella wanted to see him, that Pip starts...
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Great Expectations
Miss Havisham's decaying mansion, ironically named Satis House, is central to the novel as from it derive character development and thematic concerns. Characterization Miss Havisham The daughter of...
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Great Expectations
After Pip comes into his fortune, he attempts to change his life by becoming what he thinks is a gentleman. He goes to London and studies with a tutor, Mr. Matthew Pocket, to become acquainted with...
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Great Expectations
After going to Satis House as a young boy and being ridiculed and called "common" by Estella, Pip feels the sting of being from the lower class and desires from then on to better himself. Pip feels...
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Great Expectations
The Christmas dinner is described in Chapter 4 of Great Expectations. Pip does not enjoy it because all of the adults, with the exception of the kindly Joe Gargary, make derogatory comments about...
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Great Expectations
There are several different movie versions of Great Expectations. The 1946 version follows the book fairly closely, except some characters are left out, such as Orlick (the worker at the smith who...
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Great Expectations
To be clear, a lot of things happen to Pip's sister, Mrs. Joe, in the book Great Expectations. First, she becomes the sole caretaker of her baby brother at age twenty, after burying two parents and...
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Great Expectations
For Charles Dickens, Great Expectations was significant because it was semi-autobiographical. It was his revision of his earlier semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield. Besides the fact that...
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Great Expectations
In Chapter 58, after Pip has lost all his money, he goes back to his old neighborhood and stays at the Blue Boar. There, he finds Mr. Pumblechook, who wants Pip to go to Joseph and tell him,...
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Great Expectations
A lot of readers prefer novels written in the first person perspective because they believe it is more interesting. It is an interesting way to write a novel because it allows the author to build...
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Great Expectations
This really has to do with the issues of class structure in Britain. In earlier centuries, there was presumed to be a fixed social hierarchy with the monarch at the summit, followed by the...
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Great Expectations
Dickens establishes a dark and foreboding mood for the story from the beginning by the description of the marshes and his hints at trouble to come. Dickens uses the marshland setting to establish...
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Great Expectations
Pip meets the escaped convict very abruptly early in Chapter I. The location is near the sea south of London by perhaps twenty miles. Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the...
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Great Expectations
A bildungsroman is often called a coming-of-age novel because it is usually a story about the mental and moral growth of a young person into adulthood. Great Expectations is definitely a...
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Great Expectations
A coming of age story is a story that focuses on how a particular child character matures and the life experiences that make him or her an adult. Great Expectations is the story of a young boy,...
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Great Expectations
Pip narrates that in becoming a recluse from the world, Miss Havisham has prevented herself from the availability of the healing qualities of nature and friendships. Therefore, she has become so...
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Great Expectations
Pip is really a fish out of water in London. When he first gets there, he finds the city dirty and disturbing. It does not at all live up to his expectations. We Britons had at that time...
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Great Expectations
Estella’s parents were both criminals. Estella owes her life with Miss Havisham to the Victorian English legal system. Her mother and father were both criminals. Her mother Molly was acquitted...
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Great Expectations
This is a question that would naturally occur to an intelligent reader. Why doesn't Pip promise the convict everything he asks for and then go straight home and report the incident to his family,...
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Great Expectations
The two convicts Pip encounters are Abel Magwitch and his partner, the evil gentleman conman Compeyson. When Pip first meets them, he is a small boy. He is visiting his family tombstones in the...
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Great Expectations
Charles Dickens employs pathetic fallacy in the opening chapter in order to create the mood of loneliness, dismay, unrest, and trepidation. Everything is grey: the tombstone, the sky, the changing...
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Great Expectations
At first, Pip thinks that the second convict is the same one that he has encountered in the graveyard; then he thinks it is "the young man" who the larger man has threatened him with the night...
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Great Expectations
Pip goes to Cairo and Estella marries someone else. There are two endings of the book. Charles Dickens was advised by a friend to make the ending a little happier, so he revised it. However, in...
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Great Expectations
Pip’s childhood is overshadowed by the darkness of the marshlands. The first event of the book is him sitting in a cemetery when a convict comes up to him. Dickens describes the importance of the...
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Great Expectations
Great Expectations is semi-autobiographical. It is often considered a revision of David Copperfield, Dickens’s other autobiographical work. Both have young abused boys, and both feature love...
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Great Expectations
In Great Expectations, water is seen as a symbol of the separateness between two different worlds, land and sea. Pip’s safety, and his “great expectations” he believes are found on land....
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Great Expectations
In Chapter VIII of Great Expectations, Miss Havisham wants Pip to "play." She explains to him: “I sometimes have sick fancies,” she went on, “and I have a sick fancy that I want to see some...
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Great Expectations
Pip believes that Miss Havisham is his benefactor and also believes that she has done this so he will be a better match for Estella. Consequently, Pip expects that he will become a gentlemen and...
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Great Expectations
When Magwitch returns, Pip is first ashamed of him, but then grows to care about him. Dickens presents the relationship between Magwitch and Pip as complicated, starting from when Pip was a small...
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Great Expectations
Miss Havisham dies because she goes too close to her fireplace in her distraught condition after asking Pip to forgive her. The material of her old wedding dress, which she has worn for decades, is...
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Great Expectations
After Pip returns to London and reunites with Herbert at Barnard Inn, where they speak of the desires in their hearts, Pip pulls from his pocket a handbill which Joe has given him, and he and...
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Great Expectations
Pip's visitor arrives in Chapter XXXIX. At first Pip does not recognize him but only sees that he is a rough-looking elderly man whose poor English marks him as a member of the lowest class of...
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Great Expectations
The quotation in your question is drawn from Chapter 8 of Great Expectations. Pip is staying with his Uncle Pumblechook overnight before being introduced to Miss Havisham. Pumblechook is a corn...
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Great Expectations
Magwitch will be hanged if he is caught returning to England because he was deported to Australia. At twenty-three, Pip has already come into the mature version of his expectations, although...
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Great Expectations
There are some examples of characters who initially demonstrate no compassion and very low levels of personal morals, but in time they come to understand the error of their ways. Life experiences...
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Great Expectations
There are many symbols and motifs throughout Dickens' famous work, a few of which can be found in Chapters 31-45. For example, Dickens uses the motif of "doubles" or "mirrors" throughout the entire...
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Great Expectations
Pip grows up because he learns what true love and loyalty are, and the real meaning of a gentleman. Pip is manipulated early on in the story by Magwitch and Miss Havisham. He is a vulnerable boy,...
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Great Expectations
Pip’s identity as an orphan has a significant impact on his character, making him the typical Dickensian child who is a victim of life and of the failures of the adults around him. His sister,...
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Great Expectations
The first section of Great Expectations narrates Pip’s childhood experiences, and so depicts innocence coming face-to-face with wickedness. The novel starts with Pip in the churchyard, visiting...
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Great Expectations
What is unusual, and perhaps surprising, about the narrative point of view in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations is the narrator's portrayal of himself. Most first-person narratives tend to be...
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Great Expectations
Miss Havisham uses Pip to get revenge on men, and Orlick wants revenge on Pip. Miss Havisham is a troubled woman. She was jilted at the altar by her fiancé, and ever since she has been in a deep...
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Great Expectations
A man known only as Compeyson leaves Miss Havisham stranded at the altar. In Chapter XXII, after Pip and Herbert (who was "the pale young gentleman at Satis House years ago) are re-introduced to...
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Great Expectations
Uncle Pumblechook is Joe Gargery's uncle, and so is not really related to Pip, though he calls him "uncle." Pumblechook is vain and pompous. Dickens describes him as “a large hard-breathing...
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Great Expectations
When Pip returns to Satis House, he has promises of great expectations of becoming a gentleman. He does not know who is benefactor is, but he assumes that it is Miss Havisham, and that he is being...
