lgl88 's review for:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

DID NOT FINISH

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I listened to an audiobook version of this novel on LibriVox and didn't find much meaning in it. Since reading up some on the concept of Dickensian novels functioning as fiction that promotes social hierarchy and the idea that poverty is tied to morality, I've been far more critical of his works. A quote from UCSC Dickens Project: "Writers, politicians, social workers, and philanthropists of Dickens’s time tended to distinguish between the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor—categories that were enshrined in the Poor Law of 1834... Certainly Dickens was sympathetic to the working poor—what he would have considered to be the good or 'deserving' poor... But Dickens was also, like many of his contemporaries, worried, even afraid of the potential for crime and violence in poverty... there is a barely-controlled anxiety in many of his works about an unredeemable evil in some poor people." At some point, I decided to drop this book because I was listening only to complete another "classic" and not to read. Perhaps I'll try it again in the future.