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Charles Dickens was born on February 7th, 1812 in a little house at Portsmouth. He is the second child of eight children and his father is a clerk with well-paid salary. When he is a child, Charles Dickens has the access to a pile of English novels, such as Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, Don Quixote and so on. The Dickens family, however, is frequently encountered with financial issues. When he is 11 years old, due to his father’s unpaid debts, the whole family is put into jail except Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens is then being dropped out of school and begins work at a shoe-blacking warehouse in London. There in the warehouse, little Charles can only earn six shillings a week with high-density work of pasting labels on bottles. The three-month separation from his family, working in the factory and his child experience of living alone in the huge and cold London city leaves a great pain in Charles Dickens’s mind and hunts him in the rest of his life and in his literary creation.

When the family’s financial situation improves, little Charles goes back to school and later becomes a solicitor’s clerk. After work, Charles Dickens often visits the British Museum Library to fill up the deficiency in his education by reading. In 1834, Charles Dickens becomes a reporter which also contributes to his literary career.

1.2 An Introduction to Great Expectations

Great Expectations is Charles Dickens’s 13th novel and his last but one completed work. It is firstly published serially in Dickens’s weekly periodical All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861 and in October 1861, Chapman and Hall publishes the novel in three volumes. Claire Tomalin praises the literary work as “a great book, delicate and frightening, funny, sorrowful, mysterious” (Tomalin, 2011:268).

Great Expectations is a bildungsroman and Charles Dickens’s “biographic impulse” (Adams, 2003: 16) can be found in the novel. It tells the story of an orphan whose nickname is Pip and his life of ups and downs. Little Pip has never seen his father nor his mother. He lives with his sister and his brother-in-law who is a blacksmith in the countryside. Pip’s sister Mrs. Joe is a hot-tempered woman and His brother-in-law is enthusiastic, kind and generous in personality. Mr. Joe is always ready to help Pip and treats Pip as his own child. Pip is to be an apprentice to Mr. Joe, to learn craftsmanship and to establish his own forge as arranged by Mr. Joe. Pip’s life can be as plain as they have envisioned, but the invitation to Pip from Miss Havisham, a rich unmarried lady who lives with her adopted daughter named Estella and servants, to play in her Satis House abruptly changes Pip’s destiny. In Satis House, Pip gets acquaintance with Estella and is frequently insulted by the girl from the upper class. After getting in touch with the graceful life of the upper class, Pip then is looking forward to living a gentleman’s life and begins to despise the vulgarity and ignorance of Mr. Joe and the coarse life in the countryside. There is actually, however, no way for Pip to change his life, so soon after when there is no invitation from Miss 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。