Charles Dickens' Great Expectations is a novel about the formation of the self in relation to childhood. In this tale, we are met by Pip, first a young boy taken under the wing of a felon who places him with a delusional old maid, then a snobbish young man with expectations of being a member of the aristocracy, and finally as a humbled man who has learned the lesson of

Bounderby, as a manipulative, dishonest, self-centered industrialist, and Gradgrind, as a sincere but misguided follower of the Industrialists' program, rule the world for their own benefit and the benefit of their philosophy. Bounderby is characterized as a villain who sucks the lifeblood from his workers to enrich only himself He is a man who ultimately even turns away from his wife and mother and anyone else of consequence in

Bounderby is a totally negative character, who, unlike Gradgrind is inherently corrupt and unfeeling. With him it is not a matter of imposed principle, as with Gradgrind, but of inherent character. He is actually materialistic, the image of the corrupted banker who complains that the workers want more than the satisfaction of the primitive needs. He thus adopts the philosophy to serve his own interests as a merchant, whereas

He then goes to the guillotine in Darnay's placed, disguised as his friend, and acting with the assurance that it is a "far better" thing that he is doing than anything he has ever done before. 2. Political Themes: The Loss of Personal inside the Political Dickens uses characters, language, metaphor, and other literary elements in order to link his characters to the political themes in his book. It was been

Dickens took a dim view of London's preoccupation with materialism and commercialism -- even though he greatly empathized with the constraints that Londoners of the lower-classes felt. Bob Cratchit, the poor but humble clerk in the office of Scrooge, serves as the representative of the impoverished but decent working class, with whom Dickens sympathized in the mid-1800s. However, like many of Dickens' characters, he is more fantastic than realistic. Dickens'

Great Expectations Dickens judges his characters not on social position or upbringing but on their treatment of one another Character, class and social status in Great Expectations The world in which Charles Dickens wrote was one in which class and social status was a determining factor in establishing the quality of an individual's life. Social status was an element of nineteenth century society, like the legal system, that Dickens continually exposed