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Personification
Definition of Satire
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of satire, but satirists can take... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians... read full definition
Book 1, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Bringing Up By Hand:
Dickens uses satire in the early parts of Great Expectations to lampoon the unpleasant way Victorian guardians disciplined and guided their children. In Chapter 2, Pip explains to the reader how he was "brought up by hand" by his nasty elder sibling:
My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.
Related Themes:
Book 1, Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—British Education :
The way Pip describes his early education in this novel mirrors many of the author's other narratives on the standard of British schooling for children. The author uses satire to poke fun at the accepted standards of learning in Pip's childhood in Chapter 7, when the narrator explains how he learned to read and write:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in the society of youth who paid twopence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it.
Related Themes:
Book 1, Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Silly and Self-Absorbed:
When a character is as pompous and self-interested as Uncle Pumblechook in a Dickens novel, the author is almost always using them to satirize a "type" of character from everyday Victorian life; in this case, a privileged blowhard. When Pip is told that Pumblechook will take him to meet Miss Havisham to "make his fortune," in chapter 8, a scene of the most laughable stuffiness occurs. Pip tells the reader that he was "trussed up" in his "tightest and fearfullest suit" and
Unlock with LitCharts A+delivered over to Mr. Pumblechook, who formally received me as if he were the Sheriff, and who let off upon me the speech that I knew he had been dying to make all along: “Boy, be for ever grateful to all friends, but especially unto them which brought you up by hand!”
Related Themes:
Book 1, Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—Toadies :
Although Miss Havisham herself is already quite ghoulish company, Dickens employs one of his most corrosive satires to describe her unpleasant and sycophantic family members. When Pip visits Miss Havisham in Chapter 11, he immediately dislikes her relatives, implying that they are disingenuous and false:
Unlock with LitCharts A+There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had been standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.
Related Themes:
