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Definition of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging outside and someone remarks "what... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean... 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—The Catechism :
In Chapter 7, Dickens makes a verbally ironic allusion to a Biblical source, illustrating Pip's naivety and ignorance with a clever joke. Pip tells the reader that as a boy he had trouble understanding religious language:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Neither were my notions of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at all accurate; I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,” laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the wheelwright’s or up by the mill.
Related Themes:
