Great Expectations review
On February 7th, 1812, in Portsmouth, England, Charles Dickens was born, not knowing that he was destined to become a phenomenal novelist in his later years. With joyful early years, a rough later childhood, and a heartbreaking experience, Dickens reflects on it by writing the novel Great Expectations. Dickens had an amazing ability to give readers a good grasp as to what the novel explains, in true detail. Great Expectations shows a rather large resemblance with Charles Dickens’ own life and experiences, and also describes Dickens’ thoughts of love and of social class. Dickens uses a former love named Maria Beadnell to create the cruel, cold-hearted, Estella, whom the main character, Pip, falls in love with. Dickens had fallen in love with Maria Beadnell, but she rejected him, and Dickens believes it was because of their social class differences. In Great Expectations, Pip is rejected by Estella because she does not like commoners. Another experience that Dickens mainly focuses on is the idea of group mentality involving social class. This ties in with Pip being rejected by Estella because he was “common”. Estella thinks much more highly of herself, and that she is better than Pip, since she is high-class. One more theme that Dickens uses in the novel from his own experience was his rough childhood. The protagonist, Pip, grows up without parents, and Dickens grew up without a father. Like Dickens, Pip has to work in London, in a kind of factory, always dreaming of a better life. Along with these similarities between his characters and Dickens himself, a reader must understand how Charles Dickens’ own experiences influenced the novel Great Expectations. Writing is not only a way one can let out feelings that have been bottled up inside them, or to cope with any emotions toward certain matters in life, but to also express how oneself feels. In this case, Dickens channels his emotions from his heart, through his pen and on to the paper in which the