Historical Significance Essay

The novel Great Expectations was written when the Industrial Revolution was going on in England, giving the novel historical significance. The Industrial Revolution took place in the early nineteenth century. Great Expectations takes place during this time when laborers were in high demand, resulting in many women and children becoming employed and working under poor circumstances. According to Cliff's Notes critical essay, Children and the Nineteenth Century, "Children were cheap, plentiful, and easy to control. Orphanages—and even parents—would give their children to the owners of cotton mills and other operations in exchange for the cost of maintaining them." During this time in History, there were no laws that protected workers from low wages or poor working conditions.

Charles Dickens worked and experienced this particular period in time and the book is meant to take place in this time period as well. Pip was raised in the home of his sister and her husband, Joe, who was a blacksmith. Pip later became Joe's apprentice learning the trade as a child. In these times, Pip would be bound to being a blacksmith for the rest of his life. This is the labor that he learned that would keep himself from starving. Dickens puts a lot of his experiences into the novel in the forms of the character's experiences. This novel gives a great account of what it was really like before there were protective laws like minimum wage, child labor, and the maximum hours a person could work in a week. On average, children would work twelve to sixteen hour days with hardly any food. According to Children and the Nineteenth Century, children "had little protection from governments who viewed children as having no human or civil rights outside of their parents’ wishes, and Great Expectations brings some of these conditions to light."

In a classroom setting, the novel Great Expectations would be a good novel to read in literature as well as history to study the literary and historical aspects of the novel. If you think about it, Charles Dickens is a historical figure himself because of the many novels that he has written based on time periods such as the Industrial Revolution. The novels give you the chance to read about the trials that the people living during the Revolution. The novel also deserves a setting in the classroom because it demonstrates how the laws that we and many other nations have today in order to protect the laborer from poor wages, child labor, and exhaustion.

There are other smaller aspects that are of interesting historical significance such as the currency of money during the time. A good thing to be introduced to in a class, whether it be math, social studies, or literature, is the old English monetary system. This was a system that was divided up into pounds, shillings and pence. While reading the novel, one can tell that a character is most excited to receive a one pound paper note than a sixpence coin, therefore indicating that a pound must hold more value. This historical aspect of the novel, the monetary system at the time, can instigate understanding of the system in a very simple way.

Another historical aspect is the old English social class system. During the Industrial Revolution, there was a social class system that plainly broke down into two simple categories; if you were poor and common, you worked for survival and you worked under poor circumstances, if you were rich you did not work, you instead attended schooling and were spared from labor. As indicated in Great Expectations, Pip hopes to become a gentleman so that he would no longer be obligated into his apprenticeship with Joe, in other words be "coarse and common" in Pip's words. He hoped to become rich and educated to be considered a gentleman to escape the horrors of being on the lower, "common" side of the social class system.

The contents of the novel Great Expectations holds many aspects of historical significance that deserve a place in the classroom and would just as well serve as a strong tool for teaching and understanding. It shows what living with no protection from the government was like, teaches about the old monetary system that is much different from anything used today, and it also shows how the system of social class has tightened its gaps significantly from Pip and Mr. Dickens' times. It paints a broad picture of life and living in the lives of both Pip and Charles Dickens himself. Students studying this novel get a peek into old England and learn about what a hard-knock life really contains. It shows what people in old England had to suffer through to get the laws and rights that many countries in the world have in effect today such as child labor, minimum wage, and maximum hour laws.