8. Great Expectations (pg.45)

8. Great Expectations (pg.45): “ ‘MI DEER JO I ope U R ER Wite WELL I OPE I SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2…’… ‘I say, Pip, old chap!’ cried Joe… ‘what a scholar you are! An’t you?’”:
This is a note that Pip writes and reads to Joe. Dickens is using diction to show Pip and Joe’s lack of education and their common laborer life. Joe is a laborer who does not earn very much money, though he is able to support his household. At this point in the book, the language associated with Pip is uneducated. Much of the first section of the Great Expectations is written with this lower class diction style. Once Pip goes to London and begins his tutoring sessions, the diction used to reflect Pip’s voice changes. Pip’s education changes him, and he is very conscious of Joe’s lack of education. The change is language diction is symbolic of Dickens’ theme of social class; Dickens uses language to show separation. He also uses imagery to show class separation as when describing Joe in his laborer clothes, and developing Pip’s character as growing from this style of clothing to more suitable, gentlemanly clothes when he comes into his fortune and goes to London (“I dressed myself out in my new clothes…”pg.159).

Allingham, Phillip V. “An Introduction to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.” 31 July 2004. 29 December 2009. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/ge/pva10.html.