Background.
‘It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home‘ is a quotation from Great Expectations (Chapter 14).
Great Expectations is Charles Dickens‘s thirteenth novel first published between 1860 and 1861.
Context.
Quotation said by the character Pip (the narrator of Great Expectations). Pip is embarrassed by his upbringing, which he views as “all coarse and common” now that he has met Miss Havisham and her ward Estella, who he views as being in a different social league from that which he came from.
Taken from the following opening passages in Chapter 14 of Great Expectations:
It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.
Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed in the best parlor as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.
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