Themes
1) Social Class
Great Expectations is set near the end of Industrial Revolution, a period of dramatic technological improvement in manufacturing and commerce that, among other things, created new opportunities for people who were born into "lower" or poorer classes to gain wealth and move into a "higher" and wealthier class. This new social mobility marked a distinct break from the hereditary aristocracy of the past, which enforced class consistency based solely on family lines. Great Expectations is set in this new world, and Dickens explores it by tracing Pip's ascent through the class system, a trajectory that would not have been possible within the rigid class hierarchy of the past.
The novel ranges from the lowest classes of convicts and orphans to the poor working class of Joe and Biddy up to the wealthy Miss Havisham, whose family made its fortune through the manufacture of beer. Notably, the novel spends virtually no time focused on the traditional aristocracy, and when it does it makes those who still believe in the inheritance of class look ridiculous through the absurd character of Mrs. Pocket, whose blind faith in blood lineage has rendered her utterly useless to society.
Yet in the world of Great Expectations where the nobility and gentility that were once associated with the aristocracy are no longer seen as founded on birthright, characters continually grapple with the question of what those traits are based on. Can they be taught? Can they be bought? Pip tries both: he educates himself in order to gain "good" manners and also spends prodigiously on luxury goods, outfitting himself with the trappings of aristocracy as if to purchase aristocracy itself.
These tensions come to a head when Provis arrives in London, ignorantly confident in his power to use his wealth to buy gentility. Provis' misguided trust in money awakens Pip to his own misunderstanding. Meanwhile, Dickens constantly upends the old equation between nobility and class: most of the novel's heroes (Joe, Biddy, and Provis) are in the lower class while most of its villains (Compeyson and Drummle) are upper class. Ultimately, Pip comes to learn that the source of true gentility is spiritual nobility rather than either great knowledge or wealth.
2) AMBITION AND SELF-IMPROVEMENT
A "pip" is a small seed, something that starts off tiny and then grows and develops into something new. Pip's name, then, is no accident, as Great Expectations is a bildungsroman, a story of the growth and development of its main character. Dickens presents the ambition to improve oneself that drives Pip along with many of the novel's secondary characters as a force capable of generating both positive and negative results. Pip's early ambitions focus on elevating his social class, on making himself into someone who seems worthy of Estella, but in the process he turns himself into someone who feels like a sham, is unkind to those who were kindest to him such as Joe and Provis, and ruins himself financially. Through these humbling experiences, Pip eventually comes to understand selfimprovement as a more complex process involving moral and spiritual development as well. Pip's own ambitions are echoed by the self-improvement efforts of secondary characters like Joe and Ms. Havisham, who learn to write and to empathize, respectively, at Pip's encouragement.
3) INTEGRITY AND REPUTATION
In Great Expectations, Dickens explores pride as both a positive and a negative trait by presenting various types of pride ranging from Estella and Bentley Drummle's snobbery to Joe and Biddy's moral uprightness. The crucial distinction between these different varieties of pride is whether they rely on other people's opinions or whether they spring from a character's internal conscience and personal sense of accomplishment. Characters who espouse the former variety are concerned with reputation, not with integrity. Among them are Mrs. Joe, Uncle Pumblechook, Estella, and Bentley Drummle. Because these characters measure themselves according to public opinion, they are constantly comparing themselves to the people around them and denigrating others in order to make themselves seem superior by comparison. Yet because it's impossible to be sure of other people's opinions, they are never satisfied. Mrs. Joe and Bentley Drummle are sour-tempered and Pip is deeply unhappy for the majority of the novel.
Characters like Joe and Biddy, on the other hand, possess integrity and thus value themselves according to their own standards of success. Because they are self-sufficient rather than dependent on others for affirmation, these characters are at peace with themselves and can actually experience contentment.
Over the course of the novel, Pip evolves from being a person invested in reputation to being a person with integrity. Estella first triggers Pip's obsession with reputation and he spends many miserable years frantically trying to inflate Estella's opinion of him. Yet eventually, Pip learns to listen to his internal conscience and stops placing so much value on others' views. Shame plays an integral role in this education. For most of the novel, Pip suppresses his shame at mistreating Joe and Biddy and avoids apologizing to them. This behavior prioritizes reputation, refusing to acknowledge shame so that the public will not see it. A person with integrity, by contrast, apologizes because he has prioritized his conscience over controlling how others see him. Only after being humbled by financial loss and by Provis' misfortune does Pip develop the integrity to admit his own errors and apologize to Joe and Biddy. Along the way, Wemmick's respect for domestic life and Herbert's virtuousness point Pip in the right direction.
4) PARENTS
As the novel distrusts British culture's traditional blind faith in family lines, it also looks skeptically at the traditional family unit. Great Expectations includes very few models of healthy parent-child relations. Many of the novel's characters—including Pip, Provis, and Biddy—are orphans, and those that aren't orphans come from broken or dysfunctional families like Herbert's, Miss Havisham's, Estella's, Clara's, and Joe's. Though Wemmick's relationship with the Aged Parent seems like an exception, it's important to note that Dickens introduces us to them at a stage of their lives when their dynamic has inverted and Wemmick parents his father rather than being cared for by him. Not until the last few pages do we encounter the functional traditional family newly started by Joe and Biddy. Instead of showcasing traditional mothers and fathers, Dickens chooses to feature adoptive parents, mentors, and guardians. Among these characters, Joe epitomizes selfless kindness, protecting and nurturing Pip throughout his life in spite of Pip's teenage ingratitude. Though Provis doesn't participate in raising Pip, he too exemplifies steadfast devotion as he dedicates his life's fortune to Pip's future. Guardians like Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham demonstrate more selfish modes of child-rearing as they use their charges to fulfill their own needs: Mrs. Joe to better her public image and Miss Havisham to avenge her betrayal. As in his treatment of social class, Dickens challenges a system organized by blood and presents a model of parentage determined by love and care, regardless of the genetic relation between parent and child.
5) JUSTICE
From Pip's encounters with escaped convicts at the beginning of Great Expectations, to the grotesque courts and prisons in parts II and III, the novel casts the British legal system in a dubious light. Though Mr. Jaggers functions as an upstanding force in Pip's life by checking Pip's extravagance, it is questionable whether his law practice truly serves the law. After all, Mr. Jaggers built his reputation on successfully acquitting a murderer. Likewise Wemmick's separate moral codes—one for the law firm, one for home—highlight the legal mindset's inadequacy in matters of the heart or family. Most distressing of all, some of the novel's most heinous crimes slip right through the legal system. The law treats Orlick and Compeyson much more lightly than they deserve. A number of characters attempt to make up for the law's blind spots by taking the law into their own hands and seeking revenge, but revenge justice proves just as faulty: Provis' wrestling match with Compeyson on the marsh is futile and lands them both back in prison, Miss Havisham's perverse plot to torture Estella's suitors robs everyone of the chance at love, and, while Orlick may be content with clubbing Mrs. Joe for scolding him, it's clear to the reader that this revenge is deeply horrific, leaving Mrs. Joe handicapped for life. Ultimately, through Pip's development and that of the characters around him, the novel suggests that the only true and enduring scale of justice is the human conscience. As Pip becomes more compassionate, he inspires empathy among previously stoic characters like Wemmick and Miss Havisham as well. In the end, the novel's most fulfilling portraits of justice are the sincere apologies and forgiveness exchanged between Pip and Miss Havisham and between Pip, Joe and Biddy.
6) GENEROSITY
Dickens explores many different understandings of generosity in Great Expectations. Though Pip's initial generosity towards Provis is mostly motivated by fear, Provis understands it as true generosity and responds by selflessly devoting his life's savings towards Pip's future. Meanwhile, Mrs. Joe and Uncle Pumblechook understand generosity as a status marker and are much more interested in being considered generous than in actually acting generously. They thus constantly take credit for Joe's generosity to better their own reputations in town. Later, Pip believes that the best kind of generosity is anonymous and claims that his life's only good deed was his secret donation to Herbert's career. Indeed, many of the novel's most generous acts—including Provis', Joe's, and Pip's—are not recognized for a long time, implying that the truly generous give without expecting immediate recognition. Yet, despite the delay, every gift's giver is eventually discovered and thanked, which suggests that true generosity is always rewarded in the end. Pip's ability to recognize generosity shifts over the course of the novel and his early ingratitude towards Joe and Provis evolves into deep appreciation. These men also inspire magnanimousness in Pip himself, who selflessly devotes himself to Provis in part III.
Great Expectations is set near the end of Industrial Revolution, a period of dramatic technological improvement in manufacturing and commerce that, among other things, created new opportunities for people who were born into "lower" or poorer classes to gain wealth and move into a "higher" and wealthier class. This new social mobility marked a distinct break from the hereditary aristocracy of the past, which enforced class consistency based solely on family lines. Great Expectations is set in this new world, and Dickens explores it by tracing Pip's ascent through the class system, a trajectory that would not have been possible within the rigid class hierarchy of the past.
The novel ranges from the lowest classes of convicts and orphans to the poor working class of Joe and Biddy up to the wealthy Miss Havisham, whose family made its fortune through the manufacture of beer. Notably, the novel spends virtually no time focused on the traditional aristocracy, and when it does it makes those who still believe in the inheritance of class look ridiculous through the absurd character of Mrs. Pocket, whose blind faith in blood lineage has rendered her utterly useless to society.
Yet in the world of Great Expectations where the nobility and gentility that were once associated with the aristocracy are no longer seen as founded on birthright, characters continually grapple with the question of what those traits are based on. Can they be taught? Can they be bought? Pip tries both: he educates himself in order to gain "good" manners and also spends prodigiously on luxury goods, outfitting himself with the trappings of aristocracy as if to purchase aristocracy itself.
These tensions come to a head when Provis arrives in London, ignorantly confident in his power to use his wealth to buy gentility. Provis' misguided trust in money awakens Pip to his own misunderstanding. Meanwhile, Dickens constantly upends the old equation between nobility and class: most of the novel's heroes (Joe, Biddy, and Provis) are in the lower class while most of its villains (Compeyson and Drummle) are upper class. Ultimately, Pip comes to learn that the source of true gentility is spiritual nobility rather than either great knowledge or wealth.
2) AMBITION AND SELF-IMPROVEMENT
A "pip" is a small seed, something that starts off tiny and then grows and develops into something new. Pip's name, then, is no accident, as Great Expectations is a bildungsroman, a story of the growth and development of its main character. Dickens presents the ambition to improve oneself that drives Pip along with many of the novel's secondary characters as a force capable of generating both positive and negative results. Pip's early ambitions focus on elevating his social class, on making himself into someone who seems worthy of Estella, but in the process he turns himself into someone who feels like a sham, is unkind to those who were kindest to him such as Joe and Provis, and ruins himself financially. Through these humbling experiences, Pip eventually comes to understand selfimprovement as a more complex process involving moral and spiritual development as well. Pip's own ambitions are echoed by the self-improvement efforts of secondary characters like Joe and Ms. Havisham, who learn to write and to empathize, respectively, at Pip's encouragement.
3) INTEGRITY AND REPUTATION
In Great Expectations, Dickens explores pride as both a positive and a negative trait by presenting various types of pride ranging from Estella and Bentley Drummle's snobbery to Joe and Biddy's moral uprightness. The crucial distinction between these different varieties of pride is whether they rely on other people's opinions or whether they spring from a character's internal conscience and personal sense of accomplishment. Characters who espouse the former variety are concerned with reputation, not with integrity. Among them are Mrs. Joe, Uncle Pumblechook, Estella, and Bentley Drummle. Because these characters measure themselves according to public opinion, they are constantly comparing themselves to the people around them and denigrating others in order to make themselves seem superior by comparison. Yet because it's impossible to be sure of other people's opinions, they are never satisfied. Mrs. Joe and Bentley Drummle are sour-tempered and Pip is deeply unhappy for the majority of the novel.
Characters like Joe and Biddy, on the other hand, possess integrity and thus value themselves according to their own standards of success. Because they are self-sufficient rather than dependent on others for affirmation, these characters are at peace with themselves and can actually experience contentment.
Over the course of the novel, Pip evolves from being a person invested in reputation to being a person with integrity. Estella first triggers Pip's obsession with reputation and he spends many miserable years frantically trying to inflate Estella's opinion of him. Yet eventually, Pip learns to listen to his internal conscience and stops placing so much value on others' views. Shame plays an integral role in this education. For most of the novel, Pip suppresses his shame at mistreating Joe and Biddy and avoids apologizing to them. This behavior prioritizes reputation, refusing to acknowledge shame so that the public will not see it. A person with integrity, by contrast, apologizes because he has prioritized his conscience over controlling how others see him. Only after being humbled by financial loss and by Provis' misfortune does Pip develop the integrity to admit his own errors and apologize to Joe and Biddy. Along the way, Wemmick's respect for domestic life and Herbert's virtuousness point Pip in the right direction.
4) PARENTS
As the novel distrusts British culture's traditional blind faith in family lines, it also looks skeptically at the traditional family unit. Great Expectations includes very few models of healthy parent-child relations. Many of the novel's characters—including Pip, Provis, and Biddy—are orphans, and those that aren't orphans come from broken or dysfunctional families like Herbert's, Miss Havisham's, Estella's, Clara's, and Joe's. Though Wemmick's relationship with the Aged Parent seems like an exception, it's important to note that Dickens introduces us to them at a stage of their lives when their dynamic has inverted and Wemmick parents his father rather than being cared for by him. Not until the last few pages do we encounter the functional traditional family newly started by Joe and Biddy. Instead of showcasing traditional mothers and fathers, Dickens chooses to feature adoptive parents, mentors, and guardians. Among these characters, Joe epitomizes selfless kindness, protecting and nurturing Pip throughout his life in spite of Pip's teenage ingratitude. Though Provis doesn't participate in raising Pip, he too exemplifies steadfast devotion as he dedicates his life's fortune to Pip's future. Guardians like Mrs. Joe and Miss Havisham demonstrate more selfish modes of child-rearing as they use their charges to fulfill their own needs: Mrs. Joe to better her public image and Miss Havisham to avenge her betrayal. As in his treatment of social class, Dickens challenges a system organized by blood and presents a model of parentage determined by love and care, regardless of the genetic relation between parent and child.
5) JUSTICE
From Pip's encounters with escaped convicts at the beginning of Great Expectations, to the grotesque courts and prisons in parts II and III, the novel casts the British legal system in a dubious light. Though Mr. Jaggers functions as an upstanding force in Pip's life by checking Pip's extravagance, it is questionable whether his law practice truly serves the law. After all, Mr. Jaggers built his reputation on successfully acquitting a murderer. Likewise Wemmick's separate moral codes—one for the law firm, one for home—highlight the legal mindset's inadequacy in matters of the heart or family. Most distressing of all, some of the novel's most heinous crimes slip right through the legal system. The law treats Orlick and Compeyson much more lightly than they deserve. A number of characters attempt to make up for the law's blind spots by taking the law into their own hands and seeking revenge, but revenge justice proves just as faulty: Provis' wrestling match with Compeyson on the marsh is futile and lands them both back in prison, Miss Havisham's perverse plot to torture Estella's suitors robs everyone of the chance at love, and, while Orlick may be content with clubbing Mrs. Joe for scolding him, it's clear to the reader that this revenge is deeply horrific, leaving Mrs. Joe handicapped for life. Ultimately, through Pip's development and that of the characters around him, the novel suggests that the only true and enduring scale of justice is the human conscience. As Pip becomes more compassionate, he inspires empathy among previously stoic characters like Wemmick and Miss Havisham as well. In the end, the novel's most fulfilling portraits of justice are the sincere apologies and forgiveness exchanged between Pip and Miss Havisham and between Pip, Joe and Biddy.
6) GENEROSITY
Dickens explores many different understandings of generosity in Great Expectations. Though Pip's initial generosity towards Provis is mostly motivated by fear, Provis understands it as true generosity and responds by selflessly devoting his life's savings towards Pip's future. Meanwhile, Mrs. Joe and Uncle Pumblechook understand generosity as a status marker and are much more interested in being considered generous than in actually acting generously. They thus constantly take credit for Joe's generosity to better their own reputations in town. Later, Pip believes that the best kind of generosity is anonymous and claims that his life's only good deed was his secret donation to Herbert's career. Indeed, many of the novel's most generous acts—including Provis', Joe's, and Pip's—are not recognized for a long time, implying that the truly generous give without expecting immediate recognition. Yet, despite the delay, every gift's giver is eventually discovered and thanked, which suggests that true generosity is always rewarded in the end. Pip's ability to recognize generosity shifts over the course of the novel and his early ingratitude towards Joe and Provis evolves into deep appreciation. These men also inspire magnanimousness in Pip himself, who selflessly devotes himself to Provis in part III.
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