A strong advocate for social reforms, Charles Dickens
often makes social critiques in his novel Great Expectations.
Through his development of characters such as the unscrupulous Mr. Jaggers and the fated
Magwitch, for instance, Dickens comments upon the system of crime and punishment in his
Victorian Age. In addition to his character development, Dickens also employs broad
farce as comic relief and as a means of critiquing the criminal justice
system.
A good example of this farce of Charles Dickens is
found in Chapter XVI as the police investigate the attack upon Mrs. Joe Gargery.
Pip narrates,
They took up several obviously wrong people, and
they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the
circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances.
Also, they stood about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks
that filled the whole neighbourhood with admiration; and they had a mysterious manner of
taking their drink, that was almost as good as taking the culprit. But not quite, for
they never did it.
In other
words, the police are much like the Keystone Cops of the silent movies: bumbling
idiots. They operate very incompetently, trying to make the circumstances fit their
unfounded concept of what has occurred rather than look for clues to what has actually
happened. Instead of doing the detective work that they should, the men stand around
The Jolly Bargemen, drinking surreptiously. In fact, it is only drink that they can
take, not the culprit of the crime about who they are baffled, Dickens satirically
writes. In the end, the police simply leave. With no arrests made, no leads as to who
has committed the crime, the police have helped no one, served no
purpose.
No comments:
Post a Comment