One of the striking similarities between these two novels is the importance of the child. The victimized child is a recurrent figure of this time. The shameful practice od child labor played an important role in the Industrial Revolution. The working classes took for granted that a family would no be able to support itself if the children were not employed. The children of the poor were forced by economic conditions to work, as Dickens, with his family in prison, worked at the age of 12 in the Blacking Factory. In this way, many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious conditions, as their elders did. After radical agitation, in 1831, a royal commission established by the Whig government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-18 would be permitted to work a maximum of 12 hours per day; children 9-11 were allowed to work 8 hour days; and children under 9 were no longer permitted to work at all. Iron and coalmines, gas works, shipyards, construction, match factories, nail factories, and the bisiness of chimnet, sweeping, were the places where exploitation ofchild labor was more extensive. After further radical agitation, another act in 1847 limited both adults and children to 10 hours of work daily. However, the situation of Pip or Jane was not so bad as that one which suffered the children of their age. Pip begins to work as an apprentice in Joe´s forge at the age of 14 and Jane does not begin to work as a teacher until she is not of age. But, their lives are not esay. Both are ophans living in the houses of their relatives. Pip lives with her sister, Mrs. Gargery, who is always threatening him to hit him with a stick. Jane lives with her aunt Mrs. Reed and her three horrible cousins, who are constantly scolding her.
        Another important feature shared by these two books are the critics against the educative system of the moment. One of these critics was referred to the excesive importance dedicated to the teaching of Greek and Latin. Cleanliness was not an important aspect. That is the case of Lowood institution in Jane Eyre, the scool where Jane is sent by her aunt Mrs Reed. This is a charitable institution inspired in a boarding school to clergyman´s daughters to which Brontë´s sisters had already gone and in which two of them had died: Mary and Elizabeth. Life in Lowood is based in the scarcity and bad quality of meals. Cold and humidity are the two main elements present at this school to the extent that the death scene arrives in some cases. A pathetic death is that of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, consequence of the bad healthfulness and poor nutrition in  Lowood. At this point,  it has to be added that Charlotte Brontë is, as in many other things, exceptional. And as a curious fact, it has been said that death occupies in the Victorian novel the place that sexuality has today in the modern novel. It is clear the opposition which the Victorian literature showed for passionate scenes and the care with which  was avoided any sentence referred to sex.
        The rigidity with which is treated sex in both novels is one more characteristic in common. A good example of this rigidity of the age in sexual topics is in the treatment of women. In this, Dickens follows a conventional pattern. He was unable to create a female character that possessed both passions and ideas. He describes a type of woman asexuated, some kind of an angel without wings. His female characters are often surrounded of a religious`phraseology: "pointing at heaven", "surrounded in a halo", "a bless of heaven"... This exaltation of women, even in marriage, is something new of the XIXth century, as in the previous century women were seen by writers as human beings who had the same sexual appetence as men. We only have to remember Moll Flanders or Mrs. Waters to see this.
        But I think that Dickens breaks with his previous idea of women when presenting Estella. She is the typical model of "fatal" woman. She is the child of cruelty, the second version of Miss Havisham´s life, but she is also made an image of Pip´s love. Estella is cold as ice and clever as a rat. She plays with Pip´s emotions how she wants, even in their last meet at the end of the novel. She is prompted by pride. Taking into account the lack of feelings in Estella and her constant unhappiness besides Pip, it is undoubtless that their latter union is just an easy concession to the conventionalisms of the age. It is common the end with a happy ending. But, it is not so common the end with a wedding. In fact, only in Jane Eyre this action takes place, when Jane and Mr. Rochester marry after a series of difficulties. Anyway, in Dickens´novels we cannot talk about a happy end in traditional terms.
        From this point, we can talk about female aggressiveness in Great Expectations. So, Mrs. Gargery is the first domineering female we meet, but she is soon overshadowed by Miss Havisham, who, in turn, is softened proportionately to Estella's waxing heartlessness. All the while, behind these civilly aggressive women, is the wild spectre of Molly, to whose powerful hands Jaggers so ominously calls his guests' attention. This accumulation of female power is counterbalanced by two saintly characters, Clara Barley and Biddy. In the original version of the story, all of the destructive women suffer miserable fates, while the Griselda-like domestic saints find harmony that their enduring characters merit. But in Dickens's revised version, even Judith, in the guise of Estella, is spared, and the unattainable star is attained. Salome improbably renovates her chastened saint, and the moral design loses its intended force to satisfy an equally insistent convention of sentimental reward.
        None of the important women in the novel, reveal any true tenderness for Pip, and this lack of a tender maternal figure in his life combined with his lack of a strong masculine figure in his home (both Joe and even Herbert are feminized) render Pip weak as a man. Curt Hartog, in "The Rape of Miss Havisham," writes that "Together, the three [women: Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, and Estella] create in Pip a vague unbounded desire for acquisition and possession aimed equally at status and relationships that is narcissistic and self-defeating" (249). Although he believes that Miss Havisham intends Estella for him, Pip does nothing to push actively for a marriage. He merely waits for Miss Havisham to pronounce the date, only to learn that Miss Havisham never had any such plans for him.
        The figure of woman is also an important aspect in Jane Eyre. In fact, critics have seen this novel as a feminist one. R. B. Martin, who makes many fine points about about the novel's techniques and meaning, argues that it is essentially pre-feminist: "The novel is frequently cited as the earliest major feminist novel, although there is not a hint in the book of any desire for political, legal, educational, or even intellectual equality between the sexes. Miss Brontë asks only for the simple, or is it the most complex?,  recognition that the same heart and the same spirit animate both men and women, and that love is the pairing of equals in these spheres. . . . The famous plea that women ought not to be confined 'to making pudding and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags' [Chap. 12] is not propaganda for equal employment but for a recognition of woman's emotional nature. The condemnation of women to a place apart results in the creation of empty, capricious women like Blanche Ingram, who tyrannize over men whenever possible, indulge in dreams of Corsair lovers, and can communicate only in the Byronic language of outdated romantic fiction. Only equals like Jane and Rochester dare to speak truth couched in language of unadorned directness" (Charlotte Brontë's Novels: The Accents of Persuasion, NY: Norton, 1966, pp. 93-94).
        Another important aspect to speak of is the stage in which Great Expectations and Jane Eyre are set. Both Dickens and Brontë use setting as an important role in the search for domesticity. They liked to talk about places they have already known. Dickens habitually relies on setting to convey truths which the conventions of the time debarred him from expressing more openly by means of narrative and dialogue. The stage of Great Expectations is widely related with places in which Dickens spent his childhood. The village in which Pip lives with his sister and her husband is inspired in the Cooling that Dickens had visited so often for being very near to his residence in Gad´s Hill. The marsh in which Pip has his particular meet with the convict corresponds also with Cooling. This marsh becomes an image of the world Pip wants to leave. This world is the world of Pip´s own past; the marsh land becomes a vision of an underworld from which the convict emerges to threaten, and to which he now returns.
        But there is also a clear difference in setting  between Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. While the former has a circular setting, the latter uses the linear one.Great Expectations is a circular book, with Pip finding his childhood home at the end of the story finally filled with happiness and a real family. Pip begins the novel in his village, innocent though oppressed. Moving to London, he becomes uncommon, but also loses his natural goodness. Paying his financial debts and living abroad after losing his Great Expectations, he regains his goodness, or at least pays for his sins, and can finally return to his childhood home. His physical traveling reflects his mental and emotional journeys. Only when he returns to his childhood place, and childhood goodness can he begin to look for happiness again.
        In contrast, the use of setting in Jane Eyre is linear. Instead of returning to her childhood home to find domesticity, Jane can not find a home until she moves to a totally different place. Setting plays an equally important role as she moves from Gateshead Hall to Lowood to Thornfield to Moor House, and finally to Freudian Manor. She cannot find her domestic ideal at Gateshead Hall, the site of her childhood torment, or Lowood, a boarding school, or Thornfield, where Rochester hid his first wife and almost became a bigamist, or Moor House, where St. John's presence constantly reminds her of true love's rarity. She and Rochester can only create their own domestic haven in a totally new setting.
         The narrative structure of Great Expectations is leaned on a complex net of contrasts, repetitions and coincidences. This repetition and contrast as narrative models contribute to the formal unit of Great Expectations. Referring to the contrasts, we find the darkness in which Miss HAvisham lives in front of the light of Joe´s forge. The kindness and patience of Joe rebound in front of the violent character of his wife. Biddy is the opposite of Estella. The chivalry of Herbert contrasts with the brutality of Drummle. The obsesive eagerness of cleanness of Mrs. Gargery contrasts with the untidiness of Miss Havisham and the passivity of Mrs Pocket.
        The play on contrasts  remembers one of the resorts of Victorian narrative: repetition. Repetition consists on the appearance more than once of similar incidents. For instance, in chapter X, Pip is in the bar of the village with Joe and Wople. In chapter XVIII, the same characters (Pip, Joe and Wopsle) appear.
        Another interesting case of repetition is the succession of meals in which characters establish relations among them. Both Brontë and Dickens portray food and drink as figurative emblems illustrative of broader hungers and thirsts that inform characters' experiences.  The first meal in Great Expectations occurs in the chapter III, when the convict, Magwitch, starving and cold  eats the provisions that Pip has given him. And it is also interesting to point out that the first humiliation of Pip in Satis House takes place when Estella gives him the food on the floor as if he was a dog.
        In Jane Eyre, Brontë's description of the scanty, spoiled food at Lowood emphasizes hunger and scarcity, Dickens's repeated images of exuberent drunken revelry suggest a diet of abundance, excess, and contentment. In terms of technique, Brontë employs hunger as a conceit, or extended metaphor, which characterizes the theme of Jane's appetite for social, sexual, and spiritual fulfillment. At Lowood, Jane's "ravenous" hunger suggests the passion and impetuosity of her orphaned youth and the hunger that plagued the working class in the decade immediately preceding Jane Eyre's publication (Douglas, "Health and Hygiene"). Remember, while Jane is benefitting from Miss Temple's philanthropy, typhus fever descends upon Lowood, killing more than half the orphans.
        Whereas Brontë stresses scarcity and bereftness, Dickens's style itself enacts the abundance and nourishment which Pickwick Papers and his light-hearted community of contented middle-class males celebrate.

REFERENCES
 
        For this page, I have consulted the following web-essays:

1) "Female Aggressiveness in Great Expectations" by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University].

2) "Women and Social Status in Great Expectations" by M. Bernadette Vergara '97 (English 168 Sec. 2, 1996).

3) "In What Sense is Jane Eyre a Feminist Novel?", by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University.

4) "Use of setting", by E. D. H. Johnson, Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres, Princeton University.

5) "Cyclical versus Linear Setting in Jane Eyre and Great Expectations", by May Lee Ô97 (English 73, 1995).

6) "Setting and Characterization in Jane Eyre", by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University.

7) "Food in Brontë and Dickens", by Benjamin Graves '97 (English 73 Brown University, 1996).