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Can we call Great Expectations an autobiographical work, and why?

Great Expectations is semi-autobiographical.  It is often considered a revision of David Copperfield, Dickens’s other autobiographical work.  Both have young abused boys, and both feature love stories.  While David Copperfield has a happy ending, Great Expectations does not.  It shows us an older Dickens with a bitter view of love and life, but a more complex and realistic one.


Great Expectations features many aspects of Dickens’s life.  It takes place in and around Rochester, where Dickens was young and returned to live later in life.  He even based Satis House on a real house in Rochester, and the cemetery where Pip meets Magwitch is real, complete with the row of tiny headstones.


Pip’s experiences mirror Dickens’s also.  Dickens was a self-made man, even though Pip’s fortune was handed to him. He too fell in love young, though he later grew disillusioned with his wife when she wasn’t as young and pretty.  Unlike Pip, Dickens had many children.


Pip lives in London for a time, as Dickens did.  He also ends up in a debtor’s prison.  Dickens spent some time there in his youth, because his father was regularly down on his luck.  Young Charles Dickens was forced to work in a blacking factory.  It was not an experience he forgot or forgave.  It seems to inspire Pip's dislike of the blacksmith's shop.  When we hear the adult Pip commenting on his childhood, it sometimes seems like Dickens’s voice.



It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify. (Ch. 14)



Unlike Pip, Dickens was very successful.  Pip had no talent, but Dickens did.  He was a famous author by the time he was a young man.  He was wildly popular, in fact.   Dickens was the literary rock star of his day.

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