Compare Chapter 1 And 39 Of Great Expectations

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'Great Expectations' is a novel written by Charles Dickens in 1860. In this time period ( the Victorian era ) novels were published in magazines, and so were released a chapter at a time. This meant that Dickens had to make the scenarios and characters interesting and he also had to use cliffhangers to entice his readers to buy the next issue of the magazine to read the next chapter. Dickens' novels were so successful with the Victorians because of the believable characters and events. Most of his novels are based on the social background of child labour and the gentry, for example 'Oliver Twist'. After reading chapters one and thirty-nine, we can now make comparisons between the two, focusing on areas such as the circumstances of Pip and Magwitch, the settings that the pair meet eachother in, the presentation of the characters ( the changes in Magwich and the changes in Pip ), what we can learn about nineteenth century life from both chapters and finally, the message Dickens includes in each chapter. In chapter one, Pip is an orphaned child and visits the graves of his dead parents "as I never saw my father or my mother" and his brothers "the memory of five little brothers of mine" and this suggests that Pip is rather lonely, in contrast to chapter thirty-nine where he is "three-and-twenty years of age" and lives with his "friend and companion" Herbert Pocket, and is not lonely any more. He is also very wealthy by this chapter as his income since he became of age was a large sum of money from an anonymous benefactor. Because Pip is now wealthy and lives in London, he has forgotten his roots and where he came from as a small boy in chapter one; we can tell this from the way he treats Joe Gargery and is ashamed of him when he visits Pip in London. The convict Magwich's cirumstances have also changed between chapters one and thirty-nine; for instance in the

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