Sketching Victorian Society: A Corpus Assisted Study of Social Class in Dickens' Great Expectations

Abstract

The present work deals with the adjectives used by Charles Dickens to portray the social class in the novel Great Expectations. The study used a corpus linguistics methodology for data preparation, corpus development, and data analysis. The text of the novel was collected from online sources and used in the compilation of the corpus. The corpus was filtered of additional information and tagged using a part-of-speech tagger (POS tagger). The tagged data was analyzed using AntConc software. The findings of the study suggest that the use of adjectives plays a substantial role in the portrayal of the social class in the novel Great Expectations. The findings also show that there was a clear divide between upper and lower classes. The members of the lower class were humiliated and looked down upon by the members of the upper class.