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Definition of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging outside and someone remarks "what... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean... read full definition
Book 1, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Bringing Up By Hand:
Dickens uses satire in the early parts of Great Expectations to lampoon the unpleasant way Victorian guardians disciplined and guided their children. In Chapter 2, Pip explains to the reader how he was "brought up by hand" by his nasty elder sibling:
My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.
The domineering and violent way that Mrs Joe Gargery treats both Pip and her husband is an exaggerated version of the way Victorian children were often disciplined. Corporal punishment was not only common and legal but encouraged in the upbringing of children in the 1800s. Many people put great stock in the Biblical proverb "spare the rod, spoil the child." Rather than bringing Pip up "by hand" in the usual sense of the phrase—to do so oneself, with care and attention—Dickens employs the phrase to imply that Pip and Joe Gargery both get smacked with some regularity.
This satirical commentary also incorporates verbal irony on a second level to do with Pip's psychology. As previously explained, when Mrs. Joe says she is bringing up Pip "by hand" to her friends and neighbors, she is implying that she's putting a lot of hard work into it. Pip, who in his youth takes everything quite literally, thinks she means it's literally being done "by" her "hand," as if parenting were not ever done with any of the rest of the body or the mind. Joe Gargery, a simple and biddable character, is also infantilized here, as he also apparently receives the "benefits" of this discipline. He is also part of the verbal irony of this situation, as he believes literally in the efficiency of his wife's hands-on methods.
Related Themes:
Book 1, Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—The Catechism :
In Chapter 7, Dickens makes a verbally ironic allusion to a Biblical source, illustrating Pip's naivety and ignorance with a clever joke. Pip tells the reader that as a boy he had trouble understanding religious language:
Neither were my notions of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at all accurate; I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,” laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the wheelwright’s or up by the mill.
The Catechism, which Pip mentions here, says that Christians should "Keep God's holy will and commandments, and walk in the same." This means they should walk "in the commandments," or obey them: the naïve Pip thinks it means he always has to go home "in one particular direction." Dickens is making fun of the Church of England's failure to make clear to Pip what the "declarations" he is steadfastly making actually mean.
British children in this time were often obliged to learn large sections of the Bible and of basic Christian doctrines by heart as part of their schooling. Dickens felt, as he mentions in many of his personal writings, that having children learn things by rote did not necessarily mean they understood them or were actually being educated by this "education." This reference to the Catechism is a funny moment in the novel, and would perhaps have sparked recognition for Dickens' largely Christian English audience about their own misunderstandings of biblical phrases in early schooldays.
Related Themes:
