Writing of Personal Hygiene in Great Expectations and Its Moral Metaphor

In the Victorian period, sanitary reform and religion combined to endow personal hygiene with ethical and moral significance, forming a dichotomy marked by dirt that dirt became a criterion for judging cleanliness and filth, virtue and depravity. In Great Expectations personal hygiene is the measure by which Pip measures the ethics and morality of others, the external representation of Miss Havisham’s moral degradation, and the tool by which Mrs. Joe and Mr. Jaggers whitewash themselves. The writing of personal hygiene in the novel presents the Victorian ethical imagination and ethical structure, reveals the hypocrisy of the society and the ethical predicament in that period, implies the arbitrariness and unreliability of personal hygiene discourse, and shows Dickens’ reflection on sanitary reform and the demand for new ethical criteria.