Dickens's Treatment of Education and Social Mobility in Great Expectations - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages These circumstances call for a story far less comfortable about the separation of good and evil, the imputable and the innocent,........" (Reed, 1995)
In Great Expectations, Dickens gives us the story of Pip and the story of Pip's growing into a man is a portrayal of his expectations and aspirations: "Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations". It is also a realistic chronicle of Pip's enormous guilt both deserved and undeserved, his insecure posture as a gentleman, his moderate success at being a gentleman in the worldly sense and his finally ending up as a gentleman of intrinsic value.
For it is in the definition of a "gentleman" that the central dichotomy of the novel lies, and being a gentleman is directly related with social mobility and education, not only in the personal story of Pip himself, but in the stories of the gallery of characters that surround him from his childhood to maturity.
And the concept of becoming a gentleman is constantly and inextricably related to educational improvement. Not born to gentility like any other gentleman, Pip must strive to acquire all the ways of a gentleman, and for him the only option to do this lies in being better educated and improving his reading and writing: "writing some passages from a book, to improve myself in two ways at once by a sort of stratagem." Education for Pip is therefore vital, and has become the measure of his worth as Harold Bloom has pointed out:
"For Pip, writing and reading will become the beginning of his accomplishments. They are the vehicles of his anticipated upward social mobility, and the expectation not only of greater wealth but of moral superiority as well. He recapitulates the historical experience by which oral culture is devalued and writing replaces spoken communication as the transcendent value of western culture. The subsequent plot reveals how Dickens is making an accounting of the costs and benefits of modernization: writing, the production of language, and the manipulation of words and capital have become the new measure of human worth". (Bloom, 2000)
1.3 Dickens as a social climber and Pip's aspirations
As in David Copperfield which had definite autobiographical overtones, Dickens uses the first-person narrative style in Great Expectations as well, and if we look back on Dickens' youth, it is not hard to find similarities between his life and Pip's, and the ways in which the fictional Pip dealt with his issues the way his creator did in real life.
In The Life of Charles Dickens, and Favorite Stories, Everett H. Rupert relates the dismal beginnings of Dickens' own education: "Such formal schooling as he got during his early childhood was little better than no schooling at all. His tired, over-worked mother taught him his letters, and later the rudiments of English and a little Latin". This can be very easily related to Pip's earliest encounters with education:
"Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramblebush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But at ...Download file to see next pages Read More