Today I explored articles on the British Library, under their subheading, “Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians”. The website itself is very well structured, and immediately lent itself to an article that piqued my interest. The title is simple: “Great Expectations and class”, but I clicked on the link with hesitation: I have always felt a disservice from Dickens’ novel, and maybe a fresh perspective will sooth the scars of reading Great Expectations in my freshman year.
The article on the British Library is a reflection of class in the Victorian era. It immediately identifies well known books that detail the supposedly, “rigidly fixed class identities”, though the author argues that Great Expectations is partially Dickens’ dissertation in the existence of social mobility. However, the author also notes that the novel is quite different to its sibling book, David Copperfield, in its representation of ‘successful’ social climbing. Great Expectations, she writes, is a, “much darker and more haunted version of [...] class transition”. Interestingly, the articles goes on to describe the themes of emptiness and loss of self as key influences of the characters’ development. This is not an assessment I would disagree with: Great Expectations is very much underlined by the lead character, Pip, and his struggle with rise in social class, and its psychological, social, and familial consequences. However, as I read through this article, I was surprised to see the book in a completely different light. Through the concentration on class in this article, the author moves through a detailed account of class in Victorian England. Rather than presenting Great Expectations in the context of literary analysis, she instead offers the plot as a reflection of classicism in 19th century London. Oddly enough, this new explanation for the novel fits in my mind much more acceptably: the characters of Expectations, as one dimensional as they are, each represent a different social stereotype, with Pip as the symbol of social climbing that all lower and middle class people desired. Conclusively, I find this interpretation of Great Expectations much more realistic to the context of the novel.
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Noelle Ott |