Estella - Victorian Children

Gubar, M. 'Historical Essays: The Victorian Children'. Available: http://www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/victorian.htm. Last accessed 14th Feb 2015.
Charles Dickens. (2003). Chapter 49. In: Charlotte Mitchell 'Great Expectations'. 2nd ed. London: Penguin Classics. p286.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_
Alice_of_the_United_Kingdom

By the beginning of the Victorian reign the concept of childhood was beginning to change as society adjusted, furthermore by the end of the 19th century the middle classes had completely separated the world between adults and children. Previously to this children had been forced to work along side the adult world up chimneys, in mines and factories. The result of which meaning that children were completely denied the innocence of childhood. 

http://web.uvic.ca/vv/student/
orphans/childhood.html

It was during this time of great industrialisation that this concept of the importance of a proper life of a child was first created. Throughout the period a great number of social reformers and advocators of Christian values began to force into place the appropriate rights for the health and welfare of children across the United Kingdom. This applied not only to children on the upper classes but in particular of those in the working class system who were removed form positions of work and placed into orphanages if the parenting they received was not appropriate.
Charles Dickens’s work had an increasingly influential role in the awareness of life for Victorian children by exposing the vulnerability and abuse suffered by children in particular of the working class. By the age of 12 Dickens had already lost his farther to imprisonment as a result of debt and was therefore himself sent to work as a child in one of the surrounding factories. This event within Dickens’s youth haunted him for the rest of his life and caused him great concern as an adult for the lives of the innocent youth. Within some of Dickens’ most famous novels such as ‘Oliver Twist’ (1837) and ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1843) he expresses this sense of anger by exposing the reader to the vulnerability of figure such as ‘Tiny Tim’ who would be unable to survive in a harsh Victorian London as a result of their disability and no doubt die from infection. In addition is that of Oliver Twist who despite his attempts to escape a life of crime and cruelty is repeatedly thrown back into the centre of childhood suffering. Dickens’s hatred for the horror that was a direct result of the New Poor Law of 1834 which relegated the use of workhouses and split families from their young children for the purpose of industrial profit.  

Escape to the Middle Classes
To those who do not know the novel ‘Great Expectations’ on an analytical level it may be interpreted that as Estella is handed to Miss Havisham at a young age, she is fortunate in escaping the hardships that burned other Victorian children. For example Pip, that being said through an examination of Estella we are shown another side to the cruelty of a Victorian childhood that comes in the form of parental negligence and manipulation. To a modern reader we understand that childhood is ideally a time for innocence and play, instead however Dickens creates a counter view that a child’s life is burdened with grief. Estella is very much a puppet of her carer with no free will in the choices that she is allowed to make regarding her attitudes towards life but also her use of emotion. Miss Havisham herself states that she “stole away her heart and put ice in its place” therefore suggesting a complete removal from the joys of childhood. This however is not the only way in which Estella clearly suffers as a result of her childhood experiences. We learn at the very end of the novel how she (like Pip) is an orphan as a result of loosing both her parents as a very young child and that her father is actually the criminal who threatens Pip, Magwitch. The concept of children loosing their parents is a popular theme within Dickens’s work and explores this idea of how a child cannot be raised properly and happily without that parental contact. Magwitch dies before he is ever able to see Estella again and therefore she is left a puppet to Miss Havisham and her abusive husband later in life. For Estella the middle classes offered no escape from the pain of a Victorian childhood.