Bringing up a child by hand: An Examination of Mrs. Joe Gargery’s Ways In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

Abstract

This article examines Mrs. Joe Gargery’s ways of bringing up her younger brother in Charles Dickens’s novel, Great Expectations. Mrs. Joe Gargery’s ways of bringing up Little Pip in this novel, are not indeed those which could be expected from a woman, even less from an elder sister. In fact, her conduct, habits, or attitudes towards either her brother or her husband, led the Victorian novelist to the use of the phrase ‘by hand’ which appears seventeen times throughout the novel, fourteen of which are related to her character traits in raising her brother. These traits of hers are mostly negative and place her side by side with such other characters as Miss Sally Brass in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI to quote only these two. For this study, since it examines Mrs. Joe Gargery’s ways, there is recourse to the formalistic approach, especially the tropes used by the author, as all the interpretations it seeks to bring are supported by evidence found in the novel under scrutiny.