Charles Dickens Great Expectations Essay -- Great Expectations Essays

Charles Dickens' Great Expectations In the novel of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, one of the pivotal characters is a man named Abel Magwitch. To answer the question of whether this man is a criminal or a victim of society, we must first establish what a criminal is and what a victim of society is. A criminal is someone who knowingly breaks the law for self-gratification. A victim of society is someone who is subjected to outside influences, and is generally mistreated by society. In the context of this novel, a victim of society is also someone who has never been given a chance in life, and has no control over events that occur involving them. Therefore I am going to try and decide which of these two ‘categories’ the character of Abel Magwitch falls into. When we first meet Magwitch in Chapter one our first impressions of him are not positive. Pip describes him as a ‘fearful man’ with a ‘terrible voice’. Although we learn that he is in a terrible state, ‘smothered in mud and lamed by stones’, with a ‘great iron’ on his leg, indicating he has obviously escaped prison and is on the run, we as readers do not feel any sympathy for him. The reason for this is the fact that he is willing to threaten a young boy, seeming to enjoy the power he has over him is almost repulsive to us as readers, making him appear even more harsh. The fact that Magwitch is likened to a dog, he ‘glared and growled’ at Pip, does not help his case. This presents him as an animal, and serves only to alienate Magwitch from the reader. This means that we too share Pips reservations and suspicions about Magwitch throughout the opening chapters, even though it is clear that this man is scared, lonely and hungry enough to thre... ...me suffering as Magwitch. This belief would probably have evolved after his trial with Compeyson, which taught him that the law could be manipulated by class. This shows that Magwitch did not have many criminal intentions, and that he was tricked by Compeyson. In a sense Dickens is trying to show us how real justice can be hard to find. It is because of his low status and poverty that Magwitch never really had a chance. This shows how the justice system has been manipulated by society. Therefore, I think that Magwitch, while having acted like a criminal, is not to blame for his actions and it could be argued that he is even remorseful about them. This shows that he is not a criminal, but a victim of the society he lives in, because he was never given a chance to prove society wrong and make something of his life, he was just labelled and left in jail.