Charles Dickens as a Social Commentary
March 2006
A great writer and prominent Victorian activist, Charles Dickens was a strong promoter of reform, often using his literary work as a form of social commentary.
Great Expectations is no exception to this. Describing Pip’s, experiences from child to young adulthood, the novel is not only an entertaining tale, but also a journey of moral development and realization, a journey which the reader undertakes with the character.
Great Expectations presents morality in such a way that Dickens challenges the reader to evaluate and consider the views and morality of their society. In presenting popular morality and beliefs, their impact upon the character and his situations, and in observing the reactions and consequences of that morality, the reader gains a true and realistic sense of the implications of the views they hold, and the necessity for change should those views prove wrong or right. Dickens’ presentation of the views towards and treatment of children, criminals and class distinction in the novel cause the reader the pause and evaluate both their own as well as societal morality pertaining to these issues.
Philip Pirrip, or Pip, encounters first-hand the experience of child abuse. His sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, is often described as executing some form of corporeal punishment and Pip knows “her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon[
Himself]” (Dickens 8). Mrs. Joe Gargery is portrayed as a cold, hard, cynical and authoritarian figure who subjects Pip to not only much physical, but also mental and emotional abuse. His only comfort is Joe. Pip therefore, grows up in a very loveless home. This was very much the common in Victorian England, where children were often considered miniature adults and “were valued for their potential earning power” (Thompson Vol. II, 119). Child abuse was very common and discipline was often “Spartan, [
*and] punishments severe” (Thompson Vol.
II, 101). With
Great Expectations being written and published before Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic
al theory was developed (which was the first to suggest that what occurs in childhood impacts development and can carry over into adulthood), and childhood was therefore not considered an important part of a persons development. As a result, childhood was often viewed as having little impact on adulthood, while also being the time when inherent sinfulness must be curbed at any and all costs, the result of this were Victorian parents who were "reputed for being brutally severe in their efforts to "break the child’s will". This idea . . . stemmed from the theory that children were inherently wicked and must be trained to overcome the evil within" (Edgar). On the other extreme, children in upper classes were often viewed as toys to be decorated, dotted and dressed up, to be moulded into a parental ideal rather than be allowed to develop as their own person. Dickens continuously shows the result of the cruel instruction Estella has received, while at the same time showing that what Miss. Havisham has done is no different than what is being done to children all over. “That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well” (Dickens 394).
Dickens recognized this horrible issue of child abuse, and was a strong promoter of children’s rights in a time when children were still considered property, with no protection or rights under the law but still subject to the law as equally and harshly as adults. "Dickens was a crusader in the fight for laws governing the treatment of children. He likely intended to raise the consciousness of his audience to the gravity of the
problem" (Edgar). Dickens points out that to adults, the treatment received may not be considered by some to be harsh or in just, but to a child still growing and learning, whose world is only as big as they are and who do not yet have the comprehension of an adult, anything of the adult world including their treatment would seem overwhelming and incomprehensible. “[T]here is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small” (Dickens 62). The highly emotional scene in which Pip is trying to extract from Mr. Jaggers the history of Estella’s origin brings this point to life in the most evident way. When Pip demands to know why Jaggers separated Estella from her mother and gave the child to Miss Havisham, Jaggers asks Pip to put himself in the lawyer’s place, where,
he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children, was, their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life, he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to comes to his net to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, be devilled somehow (Dickens 408).
Jaggers then goes on to point out that “here was one pretty little child out of the whole heap, who could be saved” (Dickens 408). What Estella experienced at the hands of Miss. Havisham was better than what she would have experienced at the hands of society. Such a picture of a child, forced to choose between two cruel options, neither one any better than the other and neither of which will result in happiness for the child, strike sharply in the reader. Forced to pause and think about the situation, it causes the reader to think about how realistic the scenario is and how likely the reaction would be. Dickens highlights the injustice and cruelty children were facing in his time. He clearly and strongly presents it to the reader, which causes a strike to their morality and reflection on the views of their society.
Children were even more dehumanized and abused by the Victorian criminal system, a system which long held Dickens’ sympathy and support for reform. Children were tried and received the same punishment as adults. "The law treated children equally as harshly as adults. Once past the age of seven, children might be hanged for committing a crime" (Edgar). Child convicts were thought of with the same attitude as any convict, reduced to a sub-human level and unredeemable. “So the ‘criminal’ was transformed by Victorian and subsequent policy and categorization into a special and an afflicted type, even a dehumanized object” (Thompson Vol. III, 253). Dickens strongly attacks this social attitude as well, attempting to humanize the criminal and dehumanize the treatment and beliefs toward them. He uses Pip to do this, leading the character through experiences which present criminals, represented mainly by Magwitch, in a different and more humanizing light. Pip begins with the common belief as those of his time and society; that being that criminals were subhuman. He even lowers Magwitch to the same level as a dog. “I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and now I noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating and the man’s” (Dickens 19). When Magwitch returns to Pip years later, he is still perceived to be a criminal, as though Magwitch is marked for life as such without the ability for reform. The person is not the convict but rather the convict is the person, as Pip exclaims that “I believe too that he dragged one of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron on it, and that from head to foot there was Convict in every grain of the man” (Dickens 333). Dickens’ then gives Magwitch the opportunity to speak on his own behalf, presenting a system that is quick to condemn but slow to reform. Dickens takes the blame away from the criminal, and instead directs it back at the society which creates them, pointing out that the rich may have the luxury to preach and condemn, but what is to be done when crime must be turned to in order to survive? “[O]thers on ’em giv me tract what I couldn’t read, and made me speeches what I couldn’t unnerstand. They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach musn’t I?” (Dickens 343). Dickens places the responsibility on society for not better helping those which are forced to this lifestyle. He then goes on to present Magwitch in a humanized way, demonstrating that he is just as human as any other, with the capacity for as much heart and kindness as any other person.
For now my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the hunted wounded shackled creature who held my hand in his, I saw only a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe (Dickens 441).
Dickens challenges the common belief many in his day held that most convicts were born criminals (www.umd.umich.edu), instead showing his reader the human that was forced by his society into crime. The reader follows Pip through this journey, sharing the same initial belief, making the same discoveries and experiencing the same conflicting emotions. Dickens’ hope is that the reader will come to the same revelations and conclusion about these people that Pip has. As Pip cries out, “O Lord, be merciful to him, a sinner” (Dickens 455), so too is Dickens crying out for his readers to be merciful to the criminal, a sinner. Just as Pip’s morals and beliefs are challenged by these situations, so too are the readers with him, and as the reader is challenged, they begin to challenge the morals and attitudes of their society.
As most authors before and many after him, Dickens also speaks out about class distinction. He speaks about not only to the old aristocracy, the upper class, but also to the ‘new money,’ the upper-middle class, or the gentleman class and their morality. He first addresses the upper-class, rebuking their treatment and attitude toward the middle class through Estella’s attitude toward Pip. “[Estella’s] contempt was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it” (Dickens 59). Estella’s contempt of Pip is due to the fact that he is of the lower-middle class. Pip begins despairing about himself, but demands to know what makes him stand out. “[W]hat would signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me so” (Dickens 126). There is nothing biologically different between the classes, they are all part of the human race, so who is to say what signifies who is coarse and common, and who is not? As Dickens points out, the middle class are those who mostly support society, through such manual labour as blacksmithing, while the upper-class is largely “ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless” (Dickens 187). The upper-middle class, or gentleman class, is shown to be no better than the upper though, the contempt being even worse sometimes than that of the upper class. When Pip becomes a gentleman he quickly develops a shame, even disdain, for his background and family. When Pip discovers Joe is coming to visit, he responds “Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties, no; with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity” (Dickens 212). Pip falls into the newly developing society of the snob, which was arising as class mobility increased.
With the rise of class society, the phenomenon of snobbery, or class feeling,
replaced deference . . . . . Deference is a form of acknowledging one’s place in and dependency on the old hierarchy; snobbery is a preoccupation with class distinctions resulting from increased social mobility and the necessity of those on the rise to adopt new manners and customs (Brown 14).
This new snobbish attitude Dickens also challenges, reminding the class of where they had come from, how they had been before and the people they have left behind. Pip, a lower-middle class person, has a natural gentleman within him, exhibiting all of the characteristics desirable of a gentleman. These characteristics are quickly destroyed once he comes into his property, brining in fact, a reversal of what he once had. Sympathy turns to contempt, determination to laziness, faith to doubt. “There is a deeper moral in the fact that Magwitch’s fortune at first destroyed the natural gentleman in Pip, but what after it was lost . . . [Magwitch] did actually make Pip a gentleman by evoking his finer feelings” (Ford and Lauriat 304). Pip comes to realize this through his friend, Herbert, when he realizes that he had “often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude has never been in him at all, but had been in me” (Dickens 475). It is the gentleman class which is inapt, not those classes lower as was commonly believed. Dickens is trying to demonstrate that money, or property, does not comprise who a person is. Money does not make the person, the person makes themselves. Pip’s morality is corrupted by his wealth, showing that social morals should not be wholly taken from upper-class values which are based mainly on wealth. By Dickens having Pip engage in this moral journey, he also has the reader engaged in their own moral journey about their attitudes towards the classes, and questions some of the morals of their society.
Charles Dickens uses Great Expectations as a social commentary on Victorian morality, particularly pertaining to the treatment of children, criminals and views toward class distinction. By using the protagonist Pip to display and experience these views, the reader travels with Pip down this journey of morality, calling into question accepted morals and instigating a rally for change.
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