the life of Charles Dickens and how Dickens

The Autobiographical Content of Great Expectations

Many of Dickens novels draw from his life experiences , and therefore are autobiographical to some extent . Jean Carr makes the point that he was ever longing to express .recollections of his own childhood , which were his grand storehouse (453 . For example in Little Dorrit , the tale revolves around the incarceration of Mr . Dorrit in the infamous Marshalsea Prison of London which held faulting debtors , and we know that Dickens own father was held for debt charges in the same prison and his early life is palpably

shaped by this event . Then again in David Copperfield the child protagonist undergoes hardship in a large factory Dickens himself was forced to work in such a factory at a young age after his father was imprisoned and his mother moved into prison with a large family , leaving the author practically an orphan . But Great Expectations must be described as his most autobiographical novel . This is not only because we find more autobiographical details than any other novel , but also because the underlying theme itself expresses the idealism of the mature Dickens . The author is not only reflecting on his early life experiences , as we find in most of his other novels , but in fact he is showing to us the process of maturation , and how the mature ideology came to shaped . In this sense it is a bildungsroman , which makes it profoundly autobiographical at the same time . This is despite the fact that most of the narrative is purely fictional , and departs greatly from real life . The real purpose of the author is to present us with the inner experience of his life , and not merely to reproduce external detail . To this end he resorts to fiction most of the time because only through fiction is the author able to depict the emerging idealism of the protagonist . For the same reason Dickens finds scope to delve in the larger issues of his times , concerning the rise of industrial society , and how it effected the relationship between the classes

Dickens was a staunch supporter of the underprivileged , which is understandable in the sense that he picked himself up from among their midst to enjoy fame and fortune in later life . But it was not only shallow sentimentalism that he bore towards his lowly roots . The successful and mature Dickens acknowledges that he was driven by false ideologies as a young man trying to make his way in the world . This is the essential theme of the novel . The `great expectations ' that Pip pursues while growing up are made out to be false expectations . So that the underprivileged are not painted uniformly white , and Dickens points out that the poor in society are not necessarily driven by pure motives But the matter does not end here . The great expectations of Pip are indeed rewarded in the end , for he comes to understand that money gentility and social recognition are not worthy goals , and that they are such that do...