Greater Expectations

I said in the previous post that the Victorian Age was a time when people realized they could produce solutions to their own problems. But people also realized they had power over their own circumstances and could carve out their own destinies. They were no longer bound by societal rules and expectations of stations to which they had been born and in which they had no control over.

Charles Dickens certainly painted a clear picture of thsee times in his book, Great Expectations. He builds a clear world picture and its awakening to this idea.

Pip, the main protagonist, is born into the lower-class, but is given the chance through a benefactor to change his circumstances and live as an upper-class gentleman. Pip gets to experience the good and bad of both sides. In the end, class no longer matters, because the one he loves, Estella, was born of lower-class parents, but adopted and raised as an upper-class lady. In this way, Pip and Estella have much in common. Estella went looking for a rich society husband, but found true love with Pip.

This was a very interesting story with many twists and turns. I truly enjoyed reading it and learned a lot about the time period in which it was written. No story could have protrayed the struggle between traditional and newly immerging ideas about class and social structure, than this novel. It was the main theme of the Victorian Era that was the transition people of that time experienced.

Next week, we read W.B. Yeats's poem When You Are Old, T.S. Eliot's poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, and James Joyce's short story The Dead.

Until then, Adeu!