Technical Features

Abstract

On the surface Great Expectations belongs to that class of nineteenth-century novels, sometimes called education or development novels in English or bildungsroman in German, which tell the story of a young man of talent but humble origins, who travels from the countryside to a large city where he gradually climbs the social ladder, often winning wealth and wisdom in the process, though losing something of his early innocence. Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir and Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot are two French examples of this form, while Henry Fielding’s eighteenth-century novel Tom Jones has some of the same characteristics in its story of how the illegitimate young hero travels from Somerset to London, discovers the identity of his parents, and marries the lovely heroine.