Charles Dickens Essay Example for Free

Charles Dickens Essay Pips childishness with his extremely lively imagination is later on in chapter 3 It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window as if some goblin had been crying there all night. And It seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the hulks. Both of these quotes show how childishly Pips imagination works. This can be compared to the opening chapter of Cider with Rosie in which Laurie Lees imagination runs away with him in a similarly childish fashion. Each blade tattooed with tiger skins of sunlight. It was knife edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys. These descriptive metaphors and similes are quite dark and threatening images such as some of Pips were in great expectations. Therefore both authors are showing childhood as quite a scary daunting time as well as a time when you have an active imagination. Laurie Lee has written about childhood in Cider with Rosie as he saw it because it is an autobiographical novel that describes his childhood during the war. Laurie Lee portrays his childhood and growing up with the growing up of the nation. The reason that Laurie Lee portrays this time of his life as scary and daunting is because it is also a scary and daunting time for Great Britain during the Second World War. Charles Dickens portrays childhood as a scary and hard time for his own reasons. Dickens had quite a bad childhood with his dad being in prison and himself living in the Victorian times when children were treated poorly and were worked extremely hard. Dickens wanted other people to understand the hardship that he had been through and was quite self-obsessed with his harsh childhood. He decided to tell people about this through the novels that he wrote and in the example of Great Expectations, Pip was the character that would reflect on Dickens childhood. Dickens shows Pips childhood as a time where you are extremely guilty for the things that you have done and that you are always paranoid that bad things are going to come of you because of it. Pip is almost obsessed with his guilty thoughts and fear of captivity. The theme of guilt and imprisonment often occurs in Great Expectations. These are shown in things that Pip sees and his vivid childish imagination. Part of the reason that Pip feels very guilty and that Laurie Lee does not really recall his guilt is that Pip is very much a person who has feelings and is very much a self obsessed child. Whereas Laurie Lee is more detached from his own thoughts and more interested in the world around him. This is one of the differences in the way that the two authors present childhood. Another difference in the way that the authors portray childhood is that Laurie Lee makes his childhood a beautiful childhood whereas Pips is more dark and gloomy. Lee does this in the style of his writing, which is very poetic and flowing. This is due to the fact that before Laurie Lee was a writer, he was a poet. This means that the way he portrays childhood is poetic and almost beautiful. In great expectations, however, Dickens sets gloomy scenes such as the beginning scene in the graveyard and the scenes in the marshes. Another difference is the way that guilt is portrayed along with childhood in both of the novels. Dickens shows childhood as a time when you were constantly guilty for the things you had done and the paranoia of being caught was immense. He probably had done this because as a child Dickenss father had been taken to a debtors prison because he could not afford to look after his family. This may have made Dickens feel guilty as a child and he decides to show this through Pip. A passage that shows this guilt is, It seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the hulks. This shows Pip feels guilty and is paranoid because his mind thinks that a signpost is telling him to go to prison. Laurie Lee however does not see childhood as a time of guilt but more of a carefree time where you dont have to feel guilty. A quote in chapter 3 shows this Cider with Rosie shows this, And exhaled our last guiltless days. However Laurie is not always guiltless, like pip he has a moment in the book where he felt guilty and paranoid of the consequences of his actions. This is shown in chapter 3 also, That the summons to the big room, the policemans hand on shoulder, comes almost always as a complete surprise, and for the crime that one has forgotten. Lee realises that he cannot do things such as hit people because they are of a different race. Lee is scared of the punishment that he will receive and is paranoid about when he will be found out. This is a lot like the character Pip in Great Expectations who spends his whole childhood feeling this way. This means that there is a strong link between childhood and guilt.