# data[].attributes.body
Orphans are used in narratives because they have very few ties and allows the character to discover the world that are in. It also allows writers to display the terrible conditions of which orphans had to suffer through, especially in almost all of Charles Dickens' works.

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The Gothic genre is one of ever shaping forms but all have the common trait of trying to make us experience a "sublime" enjoyment of the medium through making us feel terror

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Dickens shows in Great Expectations that crime is always a thing that follows Pip around where ever he goes. From the people he meets to complete coincidences

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Demonstrating the roles and requirements to fit in with the upper class. Dickens simultaneously denounces such views but also supports the idea of self made people

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Charles Dickens' use of Imagery and gothical language helps to build a gothic environment.

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Charles Dickens' use of Imagery and gothical language helps to build a gothic environment.

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Great Expectations provides a clear representation of how there is a clear distinction between the upper class and the poorer class.

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Great Expectations provides a clear representation of how there is a clear distinction between the upper class and the poorer class.

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Through the character of both Pumblechook and Mrs Joe Gargery, Dickens shows how the rich viewed the poor as celebrities and how there was much desperation for the poor to be 'raised up' to a higher social class. 

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Through the character of both Pumblechook and Mrs Joe Gargery, Dickens shows how the rich viewed the poor as celebrities and how there was much desperation for the poor to be 'raised up' to a higher social class. 

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Dickens uses imagery to create a Gothic landscape to seem imposing on Pip and show his vulnerability as both a child and as someone from a poor family.

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Dickens uses imagery to create a Gothic landscape to seem imposing on Pip and show his vulnerability as both a child and as someone from a poor family.

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the orphan leads the reader through their own life experiences as they discover them

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The gothic genre is intended to shock us out of our limits in everyday life

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Dickens uses Great Expectations to display the hardships faced by the lower class in a challenging 19th century. In particular he uses Pip's upbringing to discuss the difficulties, especially forchildren and the cycle of poverty.

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Dickens uses Great Expectations to display the hardships faced by the lower class in a challenging 19th century. In particular he uses Pip's upbringing to discuss the difficulties, especially forchildren and the cycle of poverty.

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Great Expectations has a fixation on how people perform and pretend about their class and status in society.

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Pip is revolted when Magwitch claims him as his "dear boy" , "the gentleman what I made." Despite this, Pip learns that the criminal is a man reduced, but still a man.

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Pip is revolted when Magwitch claims him as his "dear boy" , "the gentleman what I made." Despite this, Pip learns that the criminal is a man reduced, but still a man.

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Pip is appalled when he finds out that Magwitch returns for his 'dear boy... the gentlemen what I made'

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Pip is appalled when he finds out that Magwitch returns for his 'dear boy... the gentlemen what I made'

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Pips interactions with Mag-witch highlights how any good man will sink to the level in which he is treated

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Pips interactions with Mag-witch highlights how any good man will sink to the level in which he is treated

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Gothic writing is unique, as it crosses reality and imagination, combining both what many perceive things to be with an object or character seen in everyday life. It shows it in a new light

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The Industrial Revolution caused the creation of a middle class. They became wealthy due to their own successes rather than inheritance.

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Orphans are above all a character out of place who is to be sympathized with, as they try to make their own way in the world

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Dickens comments on the inability to successfully change social class through the unrealistic circumstances in which Pip finds wealth

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Dickens comments on the inability to successfully change social class through the unrealistic circumstances in which Pip finds wealth

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Orphans are used to show the maze of experiences that encounter threats and opportunities that may change their lives 

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Orphans are used to show the maze of experiences that encounter threats and opportunities that may change their lives 

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Orphans are used in novels to show how the character must their own way in the world they are forced to navigate alone

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Gothic seeks to create the knowledge in our mind that there may be things above human knowledge, pride and power

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Great Expectations is a Bildungsroman that explores the life of orphaned, Pip.

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Great Expectations is a Bildungsroman that explores the life of orphaned, Pip.

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Many orphans were used to show how that even though when a child was exposed to such hardship they were seen as a better and more mature person if they could deal with these problems and stay pure to their beliefs.

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"Just as places are often mysterious, lost, dark or secret in Gothic fiction, so too are its characteristic times."

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The Gothic location and background of the text reveal the sinister undercurrents of 19th century Britain and how death is always lurking behind you 

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The Gothic location and background of the text reveal the sinister undercurrents of 19th century Britain and how death is always lurking behind you 

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"It is usual for characters in Gothic fiction to find themselves in a strange place; somewhere other, different, mysterious. It is often threatening or violent, sometimes sexually enticing, often a prison"

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Magwitch's life sentence as a result of many petty crimes is an example of the severity of sentences during the time

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Convicts are treated not as humans but as animals and looked upon disgustedly even though they could be convicted for such petty crimes.

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The characters in Dickens novels often make huge social transitions, both from wealth to poverty or the other way round.

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Gothic is a motif clearly present in Great Expectations.

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to ensure fairness within social classes, the newly middle class campaigned for free trade and the right to vote

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Pip shows readers that crime is not something distant, rather a reality for those who cannot make a living

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" since Pip hasn’t worked for his wealth, he finds his new position unsatisfying and his sense of guilt is woven into the plot."

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TH

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The middle class was the class that believed than any man or woman could become wealthy if they worked hard and were dedicated to the cause

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There is not so much death as there is the living resembling the dead in the text.

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Dickens found it it mesmerizing how a person could become completely different just by changing their class

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The novel reveals that we must move on with our lives, and place loyalty and affection above wealth and social status

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Charles Dickens only wrote two books in the first person

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Great Expectations provides an insightful idea of how people of the nineteenth century could not get away from crime. Additionally, it  provides a clear representation of how poorly criminals were treated.

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Great Expectations provides an insightful idea of how people of the nineteenth century could not get away from crime. Additionally, it  provides a clear representation of how poorly criminals were treated.

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The

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Magwitch and Miss Havisham both are living examples of the dead.

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Great expectations cannot be classified under one specific genre of text as it explores more and more as the novel develops

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Dickens found fascinating how a person can become anew by becoming a person of different class, but knew the exploitation and suffering that came along with it

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Pip forced into a kind of relationship with crime. In example he finds himself on the same coach as two convicts

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Pip forced into a kind of relationship with crime. In example he finds himself on the same coach as two convicts

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Once someone or a group of people are in a specific class, it is very hard to get out of it

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Magwitch's desperation and need for food demonstrated the poor treatment of convicts on the hulks. The lack of food and clean clothing would have been an issue

# data[].attributes.body
Great Expectations varies in showing how Gothic Pip's world is, sometimes subversively showing the reader through
text and sometimes through the characters and their relationship with the past.

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Used to open the text and demonstrate how the characters develop without parents. 

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Used to open the text and demonstrate how the characters develop without parents. 

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In Great Expectations, crime exists as a powerful psychological force.

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Pip thinks of himself as someone 'pursued by the creature that had made me'

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Pip thinks of himself as someone 'pursued by the creature that had made me'

# data[].attributes.body
Pip Aspires to find the true meaning on "gentleman"

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Pip realizes that money isn't all it takes to become a gentleman and many other 'gentleman' are corrupt

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In order to ensure that the aristocracy no longer had an unfair advantage, the middle classes campaigned energetically for electoral reform and free trade. Victorians believed it should be possible,  for anybody to succeed in the world through their efforts no matter his origins.

# data[].attributes.subject
In order to ensure that the aristocracy no longer had an unfair advantage, the middle classes campaigned energetically for electoral reform and free trade. Victorians believed it should be possible,  for anybody to succeed in the world through their efforts no matter his origins.

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Magwitch and Miss Havisham both resemble the dead. They are both able to seize the living and change their will

# data[].attributes.subject
Magwitch and Miss Havisham both resemble the dead. They are both able to seize the living and change their will

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Pip aspires to social advancement and assumes the eccentric Miss Havisham as his sponsor

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Fortunes and social mobility in Great Expectations can be made and lost as easily. 

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Fortunes and social mobility in Great Expectations can be made and lost as easily. 

# data[].attributes.body
Miss Havisham is so haunted by her past, that her current self resembles that of the dead

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The Middle Class believed that all people, regardless of their beginnings, would be able to become wealthy. This led Mrs Joe's firmly held opinion that Pip would provide ample money for the family.

# data[].attributes.headline
Great Expectations blends together all kinds of different Genres together. Gothic is used as a psychological and transformation as well as crisis

# data[].attributes.subject
Great Expectations blends together all kinds of different Genres together. Gothic is used as a psychological and transformation as well as crisis

# data[].attributes.body
Pip's values are shattered, as he reassesses the true meaning of being a gentleman

# data[].attributes.body
PIp is a conscious of darkness at the heart of Magwitch's rise in fortune

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Professor John Bowen considers how Dickens uses the characters of Magwitch and Miss Havisham to incorporate elements of the Gothic in Great Expectations.

Great Expectations is not a Gothic novel in any simple sense. Like all of Dickens's writings, and perhaps all writing, it belongs to more than one genre. At times it resembles a fairytale, at other times a realistic or a comic novel, at others a melodrama: most commonly, it blends together the qualities of several genres. But gothic is a persistent thread in the book and at times, particularly moments of psychological transformation and crisis, the whole book seems charged with the force of the Gothic. In the very first chapter, for example, when Magwitch leaves the graveyard, he looks to Pip 'as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.' What is true for Pip is also true for us as readers of the book; at certain moments, the dead seem to reach up to grab you.

F W Pailthorpe's illustrations to Great Expectations

F W Pailthorpe's illustration of the first chapter of Great Expectations where Pip first encounters Magwitch in the graveyard, 1885.

Usage terms: Public Domain

There is a different use of the Gothic later in the book, when Magwitch returns and reveals to the horrified Pip that he is his benefactor. Pip writes:

The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me. (ch. 40)

The 'imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature' is of course Frankenstein, from Mary Shelley 's novel of 1818, who is a student when he first creates the monster. Pip at first seems to be comparing himself to the creator of the monster but in fact and much more sinisterly, he thinks of himself as someone 'pursued by the creature that had made me'. He is like both Frankenstein and the monster, and - most troublingly of all - like a creature created by a monster: a kind of monster's monster. This tiny gothic allusion, over in a sentence, tells us so much about Pip, his state of mind and his relationship with Magwitch.

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, 1831

The frontispiece illustrating the monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1831.

Usage terms: Public Domain

We see these Gothic forces on a bigger scale in one of the turning-points of the book, when Pip sees Miss Havisham for the first time:

dressed in rich materials -- satins, and lace, and silks -- all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about ... I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes ... Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if could. (ch. 8)

The eeriness and uncanniness of the passage stem a good deal from its repetitions, in which some simple words - hair, dress, bride, white, brightness, waxwork, skeleton - repeat over and again. It's as if Pip can't let go of what he sees, and that what he has seen is destined to return over and again, however hard he tries to escape it. His description resembles a strange incantation, suddenly punctuated by the simple words of his impossible exclamation: 'I should have cried out, if could'.

Both in Magwitch and Miss Havisham, the living seem uncannily to resemble the dead, as the boundary between life and death trembles and the dead seem strangely able to return to seize the living and bend them to their will. Pip's father is dead but Pip is haunted by substitute and ghostly father-figures, such as Jaggers, Pumblechook and Magwitch. Miss Havisham too is haunted by her own dead past and when Pip first sees her, she seems almost to have willed herself into becoming this uncanny, haunting figure, through a performance in which she stages her own Gothic misery and draws others into her dead-alive world. She has become the living corpse of her own happiness. This self-destructive (but also self-preserving) staging of herself as a bride on the threshold of her wedding arrests her in time, at the moment of traumatic revelation. Unable to let the past go, unwilling to move forward or back, she is a figure simultaneously powerful and powerless. Miss Havisham is both the victim of her abandonment and the dominant, powerful, even seductive, oppressor of Pip and Estella. Gothic, with its fascination with eroticism and death, and understanding of how deeply they are entangled together, is the perfect medium and idiom for her.

Great Expectations is not a Gothic novel in any simple sense. Like all of Charles Dickens 's writings, and perhaps all writing, it belongs to more than one genre. At times it resembles a fairytale, at other times a realistic or a comic novel, at others a melodrama: most commonly, it blends together the qualities of several genres. But gothic is a persistent thread in the book and at times, particularly moments of psychological transformation and crisis, the whole book seems charged with the force of the Gothic. In the very first chapter, for example, when Magwitch leaves the graveyard, he looks to Pip 'as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.' What is true for Pip is also true for us as readers of the book; at certain moments, the dead seem to reach up to grab you.

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Professor John Bowen considers how Dickens uses the characters of Magwitch and Miss Havisham to incorporate elements of the Gothic in Great Expectations. Great Expectations is not a Gothic novel in any simple sense. Like all of Dickens's writings, and perhaps all writing, it belongs to more than one genre.

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What does it mean to say a text is Gothic? Professor John Bowen considers some of the best-known Gothic novels of the late 18th and 19th centuries, exploring the features they have in common, including marginal places, transitional time periods and the use of fear and manipulation.

Professor John Bowen discusses key motifs in Gothic novels, including the uncanny, the sublime and the supernatural. Filmed at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham.

Read transcript of this video

Gothic is a literary genre, and a characteristically modern one. The word 'genre' comes from the Latin 'genus' which means 'kind'. So to ask what genre a text belongs to is to ask what kind of text it is. A genre isn't like a box in which a group of texts all neatly fit and can be safely classified; there is no essence or a single element that belongs to all Gothics. It is more like a family of texts or stories. All members of a family don't look the same and they don't necessarily have a single trait in common, but they do have overlapping characteristics, motifs and traits. The genre of Gothic is a particularly strange and perverse family of texts which themselves are full of strange families, irrigated with scenes of rape and incest, and surrounded by marginal, uncertain and illegitimate members. It is never quite clear what is or is not a legitimate member of the now huge Gothic family, made up not just of novels, poems and stories but of films, music, videogames, opera, comics and fashion, all belonging - and not quite belonging - together. But they do have some important traits in common.

Scandalous and taboo-breaking Gothic novel The Monk by Matthew Lewis, estimated 1818 (first published 1796).

The first Gothic novel: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, second edition, 1765.

The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance by Ann Radcliffe, fifth edition, 1803 (first published 1794).

Strange places

It is usual for characters in Gothic fiction to find themselves in a strange place; somewhere other, different, mysterious. It is often threatening or violent, sometimes sexually enticing, often a prison. In Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula, for example, Jonathan Harker, a young lawyer's clerk, suddenly finds himself trapped within Castle Dracula. That scene occurs in Central Europe, but often in classic Gothic fiction - in the novels of Ann Radcliffe for example - it takes place in distant, marginal, mysterious southern Europe; and it could just as easily be somewhere like Satis House in Great Expectations, a decaying mansion just down the road.

Clashing time periods

Just as places are often mysterious, lost, dark or secret in Gothic fiction, so too are its characteristic times. Gothics often take place at moments of transition (between the medieval period and the Renaissance, for example) or bring together radically different times. There is a strong opposition (but also a mysterious affinity) in the Gothic between the very modern and the ancient or archaic, as everything that characters and readers think that they've safely left behind comes back with a vengeance.

Sigmund Freud wrote a celebrated essay on 'The Uncanny' (1919), which he defined as 'that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar'.[1] Gothic novels are full of such uncanny effects - simultaneously frightening, unfamiliar and yet also strangely familiar. A past that should be over and done with suddenly erupts within the present and deranges it. This is one reason why Gothic loves modern technology almost as much as it does ghosts. A ghost is something from the past that is out of its proper time or place and which brings with it a demand, a curse or a plea. Ghosts, like gothics, disrupt our sense of what is present and what is past, what is ancient and what is modern, which is why a novel like Dracula is as full of the modern technology of its period - typewriters, shorthand, recording machines - as it is of vampires, destruction and death.

Power and constraint

The Gothic world is fascinated by violent differences in power, and its stories are full of constraint, entrapment and forced actions. Scenes of extreme threat and isolation - either physical or psychological - are always happening or about to happen. A young woman in danger, such as the orphan Emily St Aubert in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or Lucy Westenra in Dracula, is often at the centre of Gothic fiction. Against such vulnerable women are set the great criminals or transgressors, such as the villainous Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho or Count Dracula. Cursed, obscene or satanic, they seem able to break norms, laws and taboos at will. Sexual difference is thus at the heart of the Gothic, and its plots are often driven by the exploration of questions of sexual desire, pleasure, power and pain. It has a freedom that much realistic fiction does not, to speak about the erotic, particularly illegitimate or transgressive sexuality, and is full of same-sex desire, perversion, obsession, voyeurism and sexual violence. At times, as in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Gothic can come close to pornography.

Promotion for the film adaptation of Dracula starring Helen Chandler and Bela Lugosi

Promotional still from the 1931 film version of Dracula; the scene shows Dracula at the point of attacking Lucy. The two women in Dracula (1897), Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, embody two different vews of womanhood, and meet very different fates.

Usage terms © UNIVERSAL / Allstar Picture Library
Held by© Allstar Picture Library and UNIVERSAL

Terror versus horror

Why do readers take such pleasure in Gothic's descriptions of frightening and horrible events, and might there be something wrong or immoral in doing so? The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe was particularly troubled by these questions and in trying to answer them, made an important distinction between 'terror' and 'horror'. Terror, which she thought characterised her own work, could be morally uplifting. It does not show horrific things explicitly but only suggests them. This, she thinks, 'expands the soul' of the readers of her works and helps them to be more alert to the possibility of things beyond their everyday life and understanding. Horror, by contrast, Radcliffe argues, 'freezes and nearly annihilates' the senses of its readers because it shows atrocious things too explicitly.[2] This is morally dangerous and produces the wrong kind of excitement in the reader. Whereas there might be the fear or suggestion of the possibility of sexual assault or rape, for example, in a Radcliffe novel, there is explicit description of such scenes in The Monk. Terror, which can be morally good, characterises the former; horror, which is morally bad, the latter. Terror for Radcliffe is concerned with the psychological experience of being full of fear and dread and thus of recognising human limits; horror by contrast focuses on the horrific object or event itself, with essentially damaging or limiting consequences for the reader's state of mind.

The Bleeding Nun, of the Castle of Lindenberg; or, the history of Raymond & Agnes

Illustrations of the Bleeding Nun from the Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), written by Matthew Lewis.

A world of doubt

Gothic is thus a world of doubt, particularly doubt about the supernatural and the spiritual. It seeks to create in our minds the possibility that there may be things beyond human power, reason and knowledge. But that possibility is constantly accompanied by uncertainty. In Radcliffe's work, even the most terrifying things turn out to have rational, non-supernatural explanations; by contrast, in Lewis's The Monk, Satan himself appears. The uncertainty that goes with Gothic is very characteristic of a world in which orthodox religious belief is waning; there is both an exaggerated interest in the supernatural and the constant possibility that even very astonishing things will turn out to be explicable. This intellectual doubt is constantly accompanied by the most powerful affects or emotions that the writer can invoke. The 18th-century philosopher and politician Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful made a vital distinction between the beautiful and the sublime which has shaped much modern thinking about art. Beauty, for Burke, is characterised by order, harmony and proportion. Sublime experiences, by contrast - the kind we get for example from being on a high mountain in a great storm - are excessive ones, in which we encounter the mighty, the terrible and the awesome. Gothic, it is clear, is intended to give us the experience of the sublime, to shock us out of the limits of our everyday lives with the possibility of things beyond reason and explanation, in the shape of awesome and terrifying characters, and inexplicable and profound events.

Footnotes

[1] Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny", in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: Hogarth, 1919), pp. 217-256 (p. 219).

[2] Ann Radcliffe, 'On the Supernatural in Poetry', New Monthly Magazine, 16 (1826), 145-152 (p. 150).

John Bowen is a Professor of 19th century literature at the University of York. His main research area is 19th-century fiction, in particular the work of Charles Dickens, but he has also written on modern poetry and fiction, as well as essays on literary theory.

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What does it mean to say a text is Gothic? Professor John Bowen considers some of the best-known Gothic novels of the late 18th and 19th centuries, exploring the features they have in common, including marginal places, transitional time periods and the use of fear and manipulation.

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Professor John Bowen discusses class and social mobility in Charles Dickens's novel, Great Expectations . Filmed at the Charles Dickens Museum, London. Explore more films, together with thousands of Victorian and Romantic literary treasures, at the British Library's Discovering Literature website - http://www.bl.uk/discovering-literature.

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Great Expectations and class

The world of Great Expectations is one in which fortunes can be suddenly made and just as suddenly lost. Professor John Bowen explores how the novel's characters negotiate and perform class in this atmosphere of social and financial instability.

Professor John Bowen discusses class and social mobility in Charles Dickens's novel, Great Expectations . Filmed at the Charles Dickens Museum, London.

Read transcript of this video

Britain in the 19th century was an extraordinarily dynamic place, one that was pioneering new forms of social and urban organisation. People often think of Victorian society as a stratified one with rigidly fixed class identities, but Dickens's novels tell a very different story. Like Dickens himself, the characters in his stories often make huge social transitions, both from wealth to poverty and the other way round. He only wrote two novels in the first person. The first of these, David Copperfield (1848-50), tells a triumphant story of class mobility in its description of David's progress through hard work and talent from poverty to success, wealth and happiness. Great Expectations tells a much darker and more haunted version of such a class transition. Both are novels focussed on psychological growth or development, but whereas the narrative movement of David Copperfield is towards fulfilment and insight, that of Great Expectations is to emptiness and loss of self.

Dickens's works portray a very mobile society in which fortunes can be made and just as suddenly lost. Some of his contemporaries, such as Karl Marx, believed that the social classes were being increasingly driven apart, divided into the two opposing camps of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Dickens, by contrast, is fascinated not by the similarity of people in a particular class, but by their differences. He portrays in detail the extraordinary variety of ways, in small differences of clothing, accent and behaviour, by which people show and act out their class identities and aspirations. He is constantly drawn to characters who are at the margins, rather than the centre, of social classes: those clinging to the edges of gentility or respectability, and those who suddenly fall or rise in the uncertain world of the Victorian economy.

Great Expectations illustrated by John McLenan

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John McLenan's illustration of Pip at the point when his recently elevated social position has become precarious, having amounted heavy debts.

Class as a performance

In Dickens's work, it is often quite hard for characters to know for certain what class people belong to, or to be sure that they are who they claim to be. Class identity thus becomes a matter of performance, not linked in any essential way to the job that you do or the wealth that you have. This is particularly so in the urban encounters that he portrays. Class becomes something not given but created, a range or repertoire of performances and roles, each with different possibilities and dangers attached. Many of Dickens's characters are performers who are unwilling simply to accept their given place in society but are determined to transform it into something different, better or more spectacular. This of course gives great scope for deceit, falsity and self-deception - and for comic misunderstandings.

The cruelty of class divides

Like many Victorians, Dickens was fascinated by the idea that you could make yourself anew in this way. But he also knew the kind of suffering and exploitation that goes with class difference and never underestimated or flinched away from the cruelty and degradation that go with a class-divided society. In his charitable work and reforming journalism, he did everything he could to change things for the better, by helping the poor and trying to diminish class antagonisms. But he also wanted to recognise the creativity that is shown in the inventive ways that people live out or transform their class identity.

Self-Help by Samuel Smiles

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Published in 1859, a year before Great Expectations, Samuel Smiles's best-seller conduct book Self-Help (1859) promoted self-education and perseverance as the route to social mobility.

This is rarely a simple or untroubled thing, and performances of class often go wrong. When Pip becomes wealthy, for example, has to learn to perform a whole new identity, learning how to speak, dress, and even eat in ways that will be recognised by others as genteel. These scenes of class apprenticeship are often very funny ones, as when Herbert Pocket gently advises Pip that 'in London it is not the custom to put the knife in the mouth, - for fear of accidents' (ch. 22) or when Trabb's boy pursues him down the street 'wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his Attendants, "Don't know yah, don't know yah, 'pon my soul don't know yah!"' (ch. 33) The latter is a carnival of comic revenge by a poor provincial shop boy at his comparatively rich oppressor, someone who shortly before was as poor as he. It is funny for us but profoundly humiliating for Pip, who over and again in the novel shows us the heavy price (both psychological and moral) that he pays for escaping from the poverty and suffering of the forge. From the moment that Estella humiliates him as a little boy for being 'coarse' and common, there is no escape from the pains, desires and performance of class identity in Great Expectations.

F W Pailthorpe's illustrations to Great Expectations

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Frederick Pailthorpe's depiction of the comic moment when Trabb's boy spots the gentlemanly Pip and pursues him down the street.

The power of class

There is little sense in the book that you can get pleasure from wealth or social status. Miss Havisham is very wealthy but it is power and revenge that matter to her, not pleasure or self-fulfilment. Pip too gets little pleasure from his life as a wealthy young man in London: Barnard's Inn is horrible, 'a melancholy little square that looked ... like a flat burying-ground' (ch. 21), and his dissipations with his 'friends' at the Finches of the Grove are snobby and quarrelsome occasions. The feeling that his degrading and impoverished childhood will stain his whole life is one that he never loses. This is one reason that he behaves so badly, particularly towards Joe; although he feels profoundly guilty, Pip is still unable to be fair or generous to him.

We see the power of class through the plot of the novel as well as its characterisation. Great Expectations is plotted in an extraordinary way, as the shocking revelation that the source of Pip's wealth is not, as he believes, Miss Havisham but Magwitch the convict, radically undermines his whole sense of self -identity. There are two possible plots that a lesser novelist than Dickens might have used: a romance plot, which would have led to marriage to Estella; or a plot more like David Copperfield in which Pip comes to self-realisation and achieved identity at the end. Great Expectations gives us neither of those plots; instead, it ruins them. Pip has built up a fantasy of himself as someone destined to be a gentleman. When he suddenly learns the falsity of this, as his 'criminal' past appears in the present in the shape of Magwitch, he is almost destroyed by the discovery, and his whole sense of self is simultaneously tainted and emptied out.

John Bowen is a Professor of 19th century literature at the University of York. His main research area is 19th-century fiction, in particular the work of Charles Dickens, but he has also written on modern poetry and fiction, as well as essays on literary theory.

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Great Expectations and class | The British Library

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The world of Great Expectations is one in which fortunes can be suddenly made and just as suddenly lost. Professor John Bowen explores how the novel's characters negotiate and perform class in this atmosphere of social and financial instability.

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The middle classes: etiquette and upward mobility

Professor Kathryn Hughes describes how the expansion of the middle classes in the 19th century led to a new emphasis on upward mobility, etiquette and conspicuous consumption.

For centuries the aristocracy had been the most powerful section of British society. But from the last quarter of the 18th century, the middle classes began to grow in power and confidence. Land was no longer the only source of wealth. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, it was now possible to make a fortune from manufacturing and trading goods. There were all sorts of new professional, technical and clerical roles that required a high degree of education and training. The number of people who counted as middle class began to swell, and men became defined by their jobs rather than their family background. In 1840 the graphic artist George Cruikshank produced a caricature entitled 'The British Beehive' which showed English society divided up by class and occupation, with the royal family at the top of the hierarchy, a broad middle section including booksellers, mechanics, weavers, jewellers, glaziers, tea dealers and inventors; and at the bottom the cabmen, shoeblacks, coalheavers, sweeps and dustmen. By using the image of the Beehive, with its rigidly organized layers, Cruikshank was celebrating the class divisions at work in British society and also depicting them as natural and unchanging.

The British Bee Hive

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George Cruikshank's British Bee Hive, sketched in 1840, depicts a range of Britain's professions within a strictly divided pyramid-based social hierarchy. In the 19th century the bee was a popular symbol of industry and co-operation.

Up and down the country middle-class men managed factories, traded stock, wrote in ledgers, oversaw building sites, and sparred in the law courts. They made their fortunes and tested their metal by competing with their colleagues. Even before Charles Darwin's ideas about natural selection started to circulate in the 1860s, the middle classes understood that life was essentially one long competition.

Rising up the social ladder

In order to ensure that the aristocracy no longer had an unfair advantage, the middle classes campaigned energetically for electoral reform and free trade. By creating the conditions for healthy competition, the Victorians believed it should be possible, in theory, for any man to succeed in the world through his own efforts no matter how humble his origins. Author Samuel Smiles coined the term 'self-help' which he used as the title for his best-selling book. Self-Help (1859) had chapters such as 'Application and Perseverance' and contained scores of inspirational case histories about men who had risen from humble beginnings to become captains of industry. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens tells the story of Philip Pirrip (Pip) who is transformed from blacksmith's apprentice to Gentleman. However, since Pip hasn't worked for his wealth, he finds his new position unsatisfying and his sense of guilt is woven into the plot. Even a radical Victorian like Dickens believed that self-help and hard work were essential to a person's emotional well-being.

Self-Help by Samuel Smiles

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Published in 1859, a year before Great Expectations, Samuel Smiles's best-seller conduct book Self-Help (1859) promoted self-education and perseverance as the route to social mobility.

This sounds exhilarating, but the price of failure was very high. People who didn't rise in the world were assumed to be at fault. They were seen to be lazy, extravagant or proud and therefore responsible for their own poverty. Only those who were too old to work or held back by disability deserved help; for everyone else there was the dreaded workhouse, which was created by the New Poor Law of 1834. Conditions inside the workhouse were deliberately harsh in order to deter any but the most desperate. Families were split up, the food was meagre and the inmates were expected to work several hours a day breaking stones and unpicking old rope. In 1838 Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist partly to publicise the desolation of the workhouse, especially for unfortunate pauper children.

Chart listing workhouse tasks in 1852

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Table showing the kinds of employment performed by workhouse inmates, including breaking stones, grinding barley and cutting wood. 1852.

'How to Behave'

Even if a middle-class man did achieve worldly success, it did not necessarily mean that he was socially secure. Indeed rapid upward mobility could cause all kinds of anxieties. Class distinctions actually became more important now, as a way of distinguishing the 'old' middle-class of professional men such as lawyers and doctors from the 'new' businessmen and technocrats. With so many more people living in the cities, it became important to position people according to their exact place in the social hierarchy. Men who had risen from humble beginnings worried about fitting in. To help negotiate their new lifestyle they could chose from scores of manuals with titles like How to Behave and Hints from a Gentleman. Here you would find everything you needed to know: when to shake hands; how to bring a conversation politely to an end; how to sit and stand gracefully; what was meant by 'RSVP'; how to deal with dirty nails or bad breath; how to style your beard; or how to conduct yourself at a dinner party, a picture gallery or church. Armed with one of these books, the newly-hatched middle-class gentleman could avoid making any social gaffes in polite society.

Suburbs and servants

Following social rules was even more important for middle-class women. Unlike men, they couldn't draw status from their jobs. While husbands commuted to work every day, wives were left at home, often in one of the newly-built suburbs that were beginning to fringe the major cities. Semi-detached houses had names such as 'Blenheim' or 'Windsor' and were designed to ape the stately homes of the aristocracy. Not only was paid work for the middle-class woman frowned upon, she was also discouraged from doing housework, which was left to a growing army of specialised servants including housemaids, nursemaids, cooks and footmen. Even women at the bottom of the middle class, the wives of clerks and schoolteachers, expected to have a maid-of-all-work to do the dirtiest tasks like scrubbing the steps and peeling the potatoes.

Conspicuous consumption

The real function of a middle-class wife was to display her husband's financial success by stocking her home with material possessions - what's been called the 'paraphernalia of gentility'. Carpets, pianos and paintings, the fancier the better, were all advertised in the new women's magazines such as Sam Beeton's Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and sent a message not only about their owners' wealth but also their patriotism. Buying luxury goods boosted domestic trade and bound the growing British Empire together through the importation of precious materials and expensive fabrics from the other side of the world. Being a consumer had become a civic duty.

The lady of the house herself became a walking billboard for her husband's material success. She might change her clothes several times a day, wearing different outfits for breakfast, making calls and dinner. Her body, too, conveyed an important message about her social class. Her smooth white hands and cumbersome crinoline skirt hinted that she had not been busy with housework.

At first glance this kind of conspicuous consumption ran contrary to Victorian values such as humility and thrift. However, the lady of the house played an important part in resolving these tensions. According to Sarah Stickney Ellis, author of the very popular The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (1839), women were morally superior to men. It was their job to create an oasis of calm and quiet virtue to which their husbands could return at the end of the day. In the process men would be washed clean of the immoral taint of the market place, absolved from the sins of greed, envy and even lust that they had displayed in their struggle to get on in the world. If they were rich enough, they might also salve their conscience by investing some of their fortune in philanthropy, building houses for the working classes so that they too might experience the benefits of a happy home life.

The Women of England

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In The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (1839), Sarah Stickney Ellis suggests that women are responsible for the moral welfare of the nation.

Other female advice writers accepted that women were obliged to inhabit a 'separate sphere' from their husbands, fathers and brothers, but still found ways of empowering women. In her famous Book of Household Management 1861, Mrs Beeton opens with the famous statement that the mistress of the house should consider herself as 'the commander of an army', the Victorian equivalent of a C.E.O. (ch. 1). Mrs Beeton's intention was to make middle-class women feel that the domestic sphere was just as important as the public world to which their husbands returned each morning after breakfast. Women may have been different from men, said Mrs Beeton, but they were definitely equal.

Beeton's Book of Household Management

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Illustration from Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861).

Kathryn Hughes is Professor of Lifewriting and Convenor of the MA in Lifewriting at the University of East Anglia. Her first book The Victorian Governess was based on her PhD in Victorian History. Kathryn is also editor of George Eliot: A Family History and has won many national prizes for her journalism and historical writing. She is a contributing editor to Prospect magazine as well as a book reviewer and commentator for the Guardian and BBC Radio.

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The middle classes: etiquette and upward mobility | The British Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Professor Kathryn Hughes describes how the expansion of the middle classes in the 19th century led to a new emphasis on upward mobility, etiquette and conspicuous consumption.

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Pip aspires to be a gentleman despite his upbringing of his abusive sister and the poverty they faced as a family

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The Victorian Era saw the philosophy that every man should be able to succeed through hard work, embodied by the middle class