Introduction to Great Expectations #

Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 7, 1812 – June 9, 1870), pen-name “Boz”, was a popular English novelist of the Victorian era, 1838 – 1901.

Great Expectations is considered one of his best novels and thought to be autobiographical. It was written in serial form which was popular with commuters traveling to work on trains.

Dickens shared the belief of all leading Victorian reformers that more and better education was requisite if the lower classes were to be helped to better their condition.

Dickens was a writer of Social reform. Society is fundamentally flawed - In the novels written during the 1850s Dickens came increasingly to associate everything he found amiss in the world about him with the concentration of power in the moneyed middle class.

Institutions which had traditionally existed to safeguard the general welfare seemed to him to have passed into the hands of vested interests, committed to perpetuating rather than reforming existing evils. Society in its institutionalized aspect has replaced the individual malefactors of the earlier novels as the true villain. It was the institutions of society that were corrupt and self-serving.

As a journalist he soon established a method of cheap publication of novels in serial form used for his novels (fascicles) so that people- could read each instalment at a sitting. They were designed with episodic climaxes to compel readers to buy the next issue.

His novels are richly soaked with all aspects of human nature, destitute poverty, the misery of debt, the corrosive power of envy, the immobility of class…….all presented in lively credible prose filled with pungent dialogue and unforgettable characters.

Many feel that Great Expectations is Dickens’ masterpiece because of its tight structure and unity. G.K. Chesterton wrote that “it has a quality of serene irony and even sadness which puts it quite alone among his other works”.

According to Paul Byrnes, there has been a new adaptation of Dicken’s 13th novel in every decade of the past 100 years which he attributes to the fact that it is one of the greatest stories ever written; a powerful mixture of romance, misadventure and ruthless class conflict.

Great Expectations is the only bildungsroman of its day that one may call a tragicomedy; it goes on long enough (and is written with sufficient retrospective) for Pip to learn that life is one too. – Jerome Meckier, Dickens’s Great Expectations: Misnar’s Pavilion versus Cinderella, 2002

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I was nineteen when I first encountered Pip in the graveyard, trembling as he faces the escaped convict Magwitch among the tombstones of his dead family. I thought I was reading a Victorian novel about an orphan boy. What I got instead was a mirror held up to my own soul—a devastating examination of shame, ambition, and the terrible things we do to the people who love us when we’re desperate to become someone else.

Two decades later, “Great Expectations” still haunts me because Charles Dickens understood something fundamental about human nature: we are all Pip, betraying those who matter most in pursuit of a version of ourselves we think will finally be worthy of love.

The story begins with one of literature’s most gripping openings—young Pip, alone in a desolate marshland cemetery, suddenly confronted by a terrifying escaped convict who demands food and a file to remove his leg iron.

This scene of primal fear sets everything in motion: Pip steals from his own home to help the convict, an act of compassion mixed with terror that will echo through his entire life in ways he cannot possibly imagine. But this opening is a feint—the real story isn’t about convicts and adventure but about something far more dangerous and painful: the slow corruption of a good heart by social ambition and the poisonous belief that where you come from determines your worth as a human being.

Pip’s life transforms when he’s summoned to Satis House to serve as a companion to Miss Havisham, a wealthy woman who stopped all the clocks in her mansion on her wedding day decades ago when her fiancé abandoned her at the altar. There Pip meets Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter—beautiful, cruel, and carefully trained to break men’s hearts as revenge for Miss Havisham’s own romantic devastation. Estella looks at Pip with contempt, calls him “common,” mocks his rough hands and provincial speech, and in doing so, plants a seed of shame that will grow into a thorny forest choking everything good in his life.

In that moment of being seen as inferior, Pip begins to hate everything about himself—his background, his family, his honest trade as a blacksmith’s apprentice, the very things that made him who he is.

What makes “Great Expectations” so psychologically devastating is how perfectly Dickens captures the internal experience of shame and the desperate desire to escape your origins. After meeting Estella, Pip can no longer find satisfaction in his life with Joe Gargery, the gentle blacksmith who raised him, or in the prospect of honest work and simple pleasures. He becomes consumed by fantasies of becoming a gentleman worthy of Estella’s attention, of transforming himself so completely that his “common” origins become invisible.

When a mysterious benefactor provides him with sudden wealth and the opportunity to live as a gentleman in London, Pip assumes Miss Havisham is his patron, that he’s being groomed to eventually marry Estella, that his great expectations are finally being realized. He abandons Joe and his working-class life without a backward glance, ashamed to be associated with his own past.

The novel’s middle section—Pip’s life as a gentleman in London—operates as a masterclass in how ambition and pretension corrupt character. Pip learns to dress fashionably, speak properly, and move in elevated social circles, but he also learns to spend money recklessly, to look down on those beneath his new station, and to feel embarrassed when Joe visits him in London wearing his working clothes and speaking his provincial dialect.

The scene where Pip treats Joe with barely concealed condescension, wishing he would leave so Pip’s fashionable friends won’t see him, ranks among literature’s most painful depictions of betrayal. Joe, who has never been anything but kind and loving, feels Pip’s shame and leaves early, writing a note that ends with devastating simplicity:

“You and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends.”

In that moment, Dickens forces us to feel the full weight of Pip’s cruelty—and our own, because who among us hasn’t at some point been ashamed of where we came from or who raised us?

The revelation of Pip’s true benefactor arrives like a thunderbolt that illuminates everything in harsh, unforgiving light. I won’t spoil the specifics for new readers, but Dickens constructs this plot twist to maximum emotional and thematic effect. Everything Pip believed about his great expectations—who was providing them, why they were being provided, what they meant about his worth and destiny—was wrong. The reality is simultaneously more touching and more horrifying than his fantasies, forcing Pip to confront uncomfortable truths about class, gratitude, and the sources of his gentleman’s status. This revelation triggers Pip’s long, painful journey toward understanding what actually matters in life, but that journey requires him to face just how much damage his ambitions have caused and how thoroughly he’s betrayed the people who genuinely loved him.

What distinguishes “Great Expectations” from Dickens’ other novels is its unflinching examination of the protagonist’s moral failures.

Unlike Oliver Twist, who remains pure despite circumstances, or David Copperfield, whose essentially good nature carries him through, Pip becomes genuinely unlikeable during his gentleman phase—snobbish, ungrateful, ashamed of his benefactors, obsessed with appearances, and blind to real virtue when it appears in unfashionable packages.

Dickens doesn’t excuse these failings or present them as noble struggles; he shows us a young man making terrible choices and hurting good people because he’s internalized society’s poisonous values about class and worth. This honesty about human weakness makes Pip’s eventual growth toward wisdom and compassion far more powerful than if he’d remained innocent throughout.

The supporting characters create a rich tapestry of Victorian society while each embodying different approaches to the novel’s central themes. Joe Gargery stands as one of literature’s most genuinely good characters—uneducated but wise, physically powerful but gentle, content with his station while maintaining perfect dignity. His goodness isn’t naive or simple; it’s a conscious choice to value kindness, honesty, and love over social advancement or material gain. Miss Havisham represents the destructive power of nursing grievances and seeking revenge, her life frozen in the moment of her greatest pain, her wealth and status worthless because she’s devoted them to creating suffering rather than joy. Estella, raised as an instrument of revenge, becomes a tragic figure herself—beautiful but emotionally crippled, unable to love because she was never taught how, a victim of Miss Havisham’s manipulation even as she victimizes others.

The character of Magwitch—the convict from the opening scene whose later role I won’t fully reveal—provides the novel’s moral center in ways that overturn all of Pip’s and society’s assumptions about worth and gentility. Through Magwitch, Dickens argues that true nobility has nothing to do with birth, education, or social position, and everything to do with loyalty, gratitude, and capacity for love. The relationship that develops between Pip and Magwitch becomes the emotional core of the novel’s final section, testing whether Pip has genuinely learned anything or remains trapped in the class prejudices that have governed his life since meeting Estella.

Dickens’ prose in “Great Expectations” achieves a psychological intimacy rare even in his extensive catalog. Because the novel is narrated by an older Pip looking back on his younger self, we get both the immediate experience of events and the mature perspective that recognizes their true meaning.

This dual consciousness creates powerful irony—young Pip misinterprets everything while older Pip gently shows us the truth he was too blind or too corrupted to see at the time. The writing balances Dickens’ characteristic humor, vivid description, and social criticism with genuine emotional depth that makes even minor characters feel fully realized and significant.

The novel’s treatment of social class operates on multiple levels of sophistication. On the surface, it’s a straightforward critique of Victorian society’s obsession with breeding, education, and genteel poverty that values appearance over substance. But Dickens goes deeper, showing how class ideology poisons individual psychology, creating shame and ambition that destroy relationships and corrupt character. He demonstrates that “gentlemen” can be cruel and petty while “common” people can embody true nobility, but he also shows how poverty brings its own genuine hardships and limitations that shouldn’t be romanticized.

The solution isn’t simply reversing the hierarchy but recognizing that worth exists independent of class, that love and loyalty matter infinitely more than social position, and that trying to escape your origins by denying them leads only to misery and loss.

What devastates me most on every rereading is Pip’s gradual recognition of what he’s lost in pursuit of his great expectations. The material wealth and social position he craved prove hollow and unsatisfying. The woman he’s obsessed with is incapable of returning his love because she was deliberately damaged to make such love impossible. The people he abandoned—Joe and Biddy primarily—continue living good, meaningful lives without him, not because they don’t care but because genuine love doesn’t depend on the beloved’s presence or reciprocation.

By the time Pip understands what actually matters, years have passed and opportunities for redemption are limited. The novel forces us to ask: What are we sacrificing in pursuit of our own great expectations? Who are we betraying or neglecting? What will we realize too late that we should have valued all along?

The ending of “Great Expectations”—which Dickens famously revised after his friend Bulwer-Lytton convinced him the original was too bleak—remains deliberately ambiguous about whether Pip and Estella achieve happiness together. Both have suffered, both have learned hard lessons about the emptiness of their earlier pursuits, both have been humbled by experience and loss. Whether they can build something genuine from these ruins remains uncertain—Dickens suggests the possibility without guaranteeing it, leaving readers to decide whether redemption is complete or partial, whether love can develop where it never existed before, whether people can truly change or merely learn to manage their damage better.

For contemporary readers, “Great Expectations” speaks with painful relevance to our own culturally-induced shame about origins and our social-media-fueled obsession with presenting idealized versions of ourselves. Pip’s desperate desire to become someone else, his conviction that his true self isn’t good enough, his willingness to abandon genuine relationships for the possibility of impressing people who don’t actually care about him—these aren’t Victorian problems but human ones that intensify in any society that ranks people hierarchically and teaches them to internalize that ranking. The novel asks us to examine what we’re pursuing and why, to consider whether our great expectations are actually leading toward fulfillment or away from the things and people that could make us genuinely happy.

I’ve returned to “Great Expectations” at different life stages and found new resonances each time. As a young person, I identified with Pip’s ambitions and dreams. In middle age, I recognize Joe’s quiet dignity and the tragedy of Pip’s ingratitude. Now I see how the entire novel operates as a meditation on memory, regret, and the lifelong work of becoming decent despite our worst impulses. Dickens understood that we’re all works in progress, all capable of both cruelty and kindness, all struggling to reconcile who we are with who we hoped to become.

“Great Expectations” isn’t just one of Dickens’ finest novels—it’s one of literature’s most honest and painful examinations of social ambition, shame, and the long journey toward self-knowledge and redemption. It will break your heart repeatedly: when Pip treats Joe with contempt, when he discovers the truth about his benefactor, when he finally understands what he’s lost and can never fully recover. But it will also restore something essential—a reminder that our worth isn’t determined by social position or others’ opinions, that genuine love matters infinitely more than status, and that recognizing our failures represents the first step toward becoming the people we should have been all along. Read it not just as a Victorian classic but as a mirror that shows us our own capacity for both betrayal and redemption. Just be prepared: once you see yourself in Pip’s story, you can never quite look away.