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 graces;
the genteel city of Rochester, whose quiet nooks and stately historic
houses excercised a powerful hold over Dickens's imagination; the nearby
Hoo peninsular, with its lonely marsh villages and picturesque
churchyards; and the changing face of early 19th century London, with
its Inns of Chancery and Inns of Court, the vibrant life of the Thames,
where watermen struggle against steamers as technological changes
brought the old and the new face to face; and the river's lower,
deserted reaches, bound by mists, marshes and tidal flats, which serve
as background for the novel's brilliant menacing opening.
