The Companion to Great Expectations

About this book

This study sets out to recover and illuminate the Victorian culture and allusive verbal worlds that inform Charles Dickens's novel "Great Expectations". How distinctive are the story's temporal and topographical settings? How carefully has Dickens integrated Pip's life story with the embedded histories of a mad, jilted spinster, a beautiful orphan girl, an unscupulous con man, a fierce yet tender convict and a brilliant criminal lawyer? What relevance does the "then" of Pip's childhood and the "now" when he relates the story of his evolution into gentleman have to the revised controversial ending Dickens adopted on the advice of a fellow novelist? David Paroissien draws on a range of 19th century sources to illuminate the novel's late Georgian and mid-Victorian contexts: the brutal punishments that characterized Hanoverian England's legal system; the transportation of felons and their rough lives in Australia's first penal colony; the social mobility a public school education conferred on a swindler and forger; the struggle to gain the desired status of "gentleman" among brewers, bakers and a raw yound blacksmith from the country ignorant of the ways of society and its social grac…