Great Expectations by Charles Dickens — Analysis
Great Expectations (1861) is Charles Dickens’s thirteenth novel and widely considered his most perfectly constructed work. It tells the story of Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, an orphan boy who rises from the blacksmith’s forge to the drawing rooms of London, propelled by a secret benefactor he assumes to be the wealthy Miss Havisham. The novel is a bildungsroman — a coming-of-age story — but it is also a psychological thriller, a social comedy, and a meditation on guilt, ambition, and the nature of gentility.
Dickens wrote Great Expectations at the height of his powers. He was fifty years old, the most famous novelist in the English-speaking world, and grappling with his own history of class mobility. Like Pip, Dickens had risen from poverty to wealth and knew the costs of that ascent. The novel is in part a reckoning with those costs.
The Plot
Pip, a boy of about seven, is visiting his parents’ graves when he is seized by an escaped convict named Magwitch. The terrified Pip brings the convict food and a file. Magwitch is recaptured, but the encounter haunts Pip.
Some years later, Pip is summoned to Satis House, the decaying mansion of Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster who was jilted on her wedding day and has stopped every clock in the house. He meets her adopted daughter, Estella, who is beautiful and cruel. Pip falls in love with her, and his desire to become a gentleman is born.
A London lawyer appears and tells Pip he has “great expectations” — a secret benefactor will provide the funds to make him a gentleman. Pip assumes Miss Havisham is the benefactor and that she intends him for Estella. He leaves for London, abandons his loyal friends Joe and Biddy, and embarks on his transformation.
The great twist — one of the most famous in English literature — is that the benefactor is not Miss Havisham but Magwitch, the convict Pip helped years ago. Magwitch has made a fortune in Australia and has devoted his life to creating a gentleman. Pip must confront his snobbery, his ingratitude to Joe, and the source of his fortune.
Characters
Pip is Dickens’s most psychologically complex protagonist. He is not a hero in the conventional sense. He is snobbish, ashamed of his origins, and capable of great cruelty to those who love him. But he is also capable of growth. The novel tracks his moral education — his realization that gentility is not a matter of money or manners but of character.
Joe Gargery is the blacksmith who raises Pip. He is uneducated, gentle, and consistently good. He represents the world Pip rejects, and his quiet dignity convicts Pip more effectively than any lecture could. Joe’s final words to Pip — “You and me is not two figures to be together in London” — are among the most heartbreaking in the novel.
Miss Havisham is one of Dickens’s great grotesques. She sits in her wedding dress in a room where the clocks have stopped, surrounded by the decayed remains of her wedding feast. She has raised Estella to break men’s hearts as revenge for her own suffering. But she is not merely a monster — she is a tragic figure, a woman whose life stopped at the moment of her greatest pain.
Estella is more symbol than character in much of the novel. She is beautiful, cold, and trained to be cruel. But in the novel’s final chapters, she gains depth. Her marriage to the brutal Bentley Drummle and her eventual escape from that marriage give her an arc of her own.
Magwitch is the soul of the novel. He is a convict, a criminal, a man the law has condemned. But he is also generous, loyal, and capable of love. His return to England to see the gentleman he has created is the novel’s emotional climax. His trial and death are the novel’s moral center.
Herbert Pocket is Pip’s friend and roommate in London. He is cheerful, honorable, and gently comic. His relationship with Pip provides the warmth that Pip’s relationship with Estella cannot.
Major Themes
Class and Snobbery
Great Expectations is a novel about the moral corruption of class ambition. Pip wants to be a gentleman because he believes it will make him worthy of Estella and superior to Joe. He is wrong on both counts. The gentlemen Pip meets in London are idle, cruel, and bankrupt. The honest labor of Joe’s forge is worth more than all their conversation.
Dickens was acutely aware of class, having experienced both poverty and wealth. His treatment of Pip’s snobbery is unforgiving. Pip’s shame at Joe’s rough hands and common speech is shown as a moral failing. The novel argues that true gentility is a matter of character, not class.
Guilt and Crime
The novel opens with a crime — Pip’s theft of the file and food for Magwitch — and the feeling of guilt never leaves him. Pip is haunted by the idea that he is a criminal at heart, that his rise is built on a foundation of wrongdoing. This psychological burden is the source of the novel’s gothic atmosphere.
The guilt is not just Pip’s. Miss Havisham’s guilt over Estella’s upbringing, Magwitch’s guilt over his criminal past, the complicity of the legal system in injustice — the novel is saturated with moral reckoning.
Education and Growth
The novel is a bildungsroman, but Pip’s education is not what he thinks it is. He goes to London to learn to be a gentleman. What he actually learns is that being a gentleman is worthless. His real education happens when he returns to the forge, when he cares for the dying Magwitch, when he asks Joe for forgiveness.
Crime and Justice
The novel is deeply interested in the gap between legal justice and moral justice. Magwitch is a criminal by law but a good man by character. Compeyson, the gentleman who corrupted Magwitch, is the real villain. The legal system protects Compeyson and condemns Magwitch. Dickens’s critique of the justice system is relentless.
Style and Structure
Great Expectations is narrated by the adult Pip looking back on his life. The double perspective — the younger Pip experiencing events, the older Pip reflecting on them — is one of Dickens’s most effective narrative techniques. The reader sees both what Pip felt at the time and what he understands now.
The novel is one of Dickens’s shortest and tightest. There is little of the digression and comic relief that fill his earlier novels. Every scene advances the plot or deepens the character. The result is a novel of remarkable economy and power.
The Two Endings
Dickens originally wrote a bleak ending in which Pip and Estella meet by chance and part forever. At the suggestion of his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, he wrote a revised ending in which the two are reunited. The revised ending is the one published and the one most readers know.
Both endings are defensible. The original ending is truer to the novel’s themes and more consistent with Estella’s character. The revised ending is more hopeful and more in keeping with Pip’s earned maturity. The debate about which ending is better has never been resolved.
Social Context
Great Expectations was published in 1861, at the height of the Victorian era. Britain was the world’s wealthiest nation, but its wealth was distributed with grotesque inequality. The novel reflects contemporary anxieties about class mobility, criminal justice, and the nature of respectability. Dickens had visited Australia and was fascinated by the idea of the colonies as a place of both punishment and redemption — Magwitch’s story embodies this duality.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Pip’s benefactor? The convict Magwitch, whom Pip helped as a child. Magwitch made a fortune in Australia and devoted it to making Pip a gentleman. Pip mistakenly believes Miss Havisham is his benefactor.
What happens to Miss Havisham? She is badly burned in a fire at Satis House, caused when her wedding dress catches fire. Pip rescues her, but she later dies from her injuries. Her death is both a punishment and a release.
Does Pip marry Estella? In the revised ending, the two are reunited and the implication is that they will be together. In the original ending, they part forever. Dickens’s friend convinced him that readers wanted a happier ending.
What is the moral of Great Expectations? The moral is that true worth is a matter of character, not class or wealth. Pip learns that Joe’s simple goodness is worth more than all the gentility London can offer, and that his own snobbery was a moral failing.
Why does Magwitch return to England? He returns illegally — he was transported to Australia for life and would be executed if caught back in England. He returns because he wants to see the gentleman he has created. His love for Pip, however distorted, is genuine.
Also explore: Our summaries of Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and 1984.