History & The Arts
Approaching literature: reading Great Expectations
...adult narrator looking back over a considerable time and so able to exercise adult judgements about himself. For example, he says that it was a ‘childish conclusion’ of his young self to imagine his dead mother ‘freckled and sickly’ on the basis of the gravestone inscription ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above’ (Dickens, Great Expectations, 1994 edn, p.3). We...