Charles Dickens the author of ‘Great Expectations’

The following sample essay on “Charles Dickens the author of ‘Great Expectations’”: review on ‘Great Expectations’ and literal devises used in story.

He was the second child of six. His father was a clerk in the Navy pay office; he was often in debt and ended up in Marshabea prison. Charles was lucky enough in such difficult circumstances to have a few years of schooling before he was sent to work as a friend of the family. Charles worked in this Factory for seven shillings a week.

It seems that it was from this background that Dickens drew from for most of his writings. It is evident that the real people he had met during his life inspired the plots and characters in his novels.

As Charles’s family wealth increased he again went back to school after finishing school he started work as a solicitors clerk, he then progressed as a court reporter it was at this stage in his life that he started supplementing his income by writing.

This essay will focus on the settings in which this novel takes place and how they are described and depicted, it will also look at how these settings relate to the characters in the plot and their personality traits. The settings will also be examined in terms of the life and times of Victorian England.

Dickens is famous for his use of language to describe people, places, and features of the landscapes in which his novels take place. In this essay, I will examine two major points about Dickens’s use of language to create characters, firstly through character and secondly through using descriptive language and imagery to convey the mood of particular scenes.

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The opening scene of Great Expectations is set in a graveyard on the Kent marshes; the main character Pip is visiting his mother’s grave. Pip, is an orphan and is being raised by his abusive sister and her husband, Joe Gargery the kindly village Blacksmith.

Suddenly in the first scene, Pip is grabbed by an escaped convict, Magwitch who is hiding in the graveyard, who cried out “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat! “, the convict is trying to force Pip to aid him he pesters Pip about where he lives, demanding food and a file to break his chains. Pip is terrified and informs the convict that his Mother is nearby; the convict reacts by suddenly starting to run away from Pip, then he stops and looks over his shoulder realising there is nobody there he continues his aggressive line of questioning.

The language that Dickens uses to describe the scene of the graveyard creates a bleak and eerie atmosphere to the setting; it is very bleak and depressing the way things are depicted. The convict’s appearance is described in great detail, his poor and rough demeanour is emphasised over and over again using different examples of the way he has been afflicted by nettles, stones flints, etc. Also, Dickens uses lots of descriptive words to really put across the state of the man and to invoke a strong sense of his appearance.