Do you think the title of Dickens’ Great Expectations is appropriate? Give reasons for your answer.

 It is because it is a novel about the maturation both physically and psychologically of the main character Pip. Great Expectations was written by Charles Dickens, one of Victorian England’s most acclaimed and popular novelists.

He wrote this novel comparatively late in life, just after A Tale of Two Cities. In Great Expectations, we see Dickens at his most experimental. The novel was serialized published in installments in a magazine-from 186061, when the Victorian era was at its height and the rapid social change was accompanied by anxiety.

Dickens used his platform as a popular author to educate his audience about social issues. In Great Expectations, the topics of education and penal reform loom large. Like Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, published the previous year, Great Expectations deals with the restrictive marriage laws of the time. Central to Dickens’ novel is its narrator and protagonist, Pip.

Pip is both the narrator of Great Expectations and its chief protagonist. His perspective both determines what we see and how we see it. The novel follows Pip from the age of about eight to his mid-thirties and qualifies as a bildungsroman. “Bildungsroman’ is a German word. Translated into English, it describes a novel about the intellectual and emotional formation of its protagonist.’

Great Expectations is divided into three parts corresponding to the phases of Pip’s life. The first stage covers his childhood, during which he is brought up by hand by his older sister, his parents having died. The second covers his apprenticeship in London, from his mid-teens to his coming of age, at which time he also comes into his mysterious inheritance, of which he has such great expectations (hence the novel’s name).

The third part of the novel shows Pip (finally!) getting a better grip on who he is and who he wants to be, from his mid-twenties to his mid-thirties. It also covers how those ‘great expectations are and are not fulfilled. Though Great Expectations is categorized as a Bildungsroman, Dickens modifies the novel’s tone for dramatic effect.

At various points throughout the narrative, different genres may seem to predominate. Pip’s childhood is written realistically, while elements of the gothic reflect his own fright, and elements of satire reflect his innocent perception of the ridiculous. Later in the novel, the tone becomes darker, as Pip sees more of the world and its injustices.

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