Great Expectations — themes & analysis

Pip's central ambition, from the first visit to Satis House onward, is to become a gentleman. The word organizes everything he does for the next decade and a half. He is ashamed of his coarse hands and thick boots when Estella points them out; he is ashamed of Joe's dialect and his sister's manners; he is ashamed of the forge itself when he first sees it through Estella's eyes. The mysterious legacy from his unknown benefactor is supposed to fix this — to remove him from the village, to dress him in fine clothes, to teach him the manners of London society, to qualify him as the kind of man Estella might marry.

Dickens spends the novel systematically dismantling what that aspiration actually contains. The gentlemen of London, when Pip meets them, turn out to be either casually cruel (Bentley Drummle), pretentious nonentities (the Pocket relations), or trapped in lives of unproductive consumption (Pip himself, by Volume Two, is in debt and bored). The qualification of being a gentleman is in fact the absence of useful work, the inheritance of someone else's money, and a manner that distinguishes you from people who do work and have earned their bread.

The whole construction is parasitic, and the cleverness of the novel is that the parasite, in Pip's case, turns out to be feeding on a transported convict's gratitude. When Magwitch reveals himself in Chapter 39 as the source of the gentleman's fortune, the gentleman's life Pip has been building reveals itself as an extension of exactly the kind of person Pip's gentility had been distancing him from.

The class system Pip has been climbing is shown, in the same instant, to be sustained by money flowing from the lowest layers up — the rural poor, the criminal classes, the convicts shipped to Australia — into the leisure of the polished few. Dickens does not editorialize on the point. He lets the plot make the argument, and the plot's argument is the most precise indictment of Victorian class in any English novel of the century.

Where to follow it: Chapter 8 (Estella names the shame), Chapter 18 (the fortune announced), Chapter 34 (Pip in debt, drift), Chapter 39 (the great reveal).

Great Expectations is the only Dickens novel apart from David Copperfield that he sustains in the first person across its full length, and the technical achievement of the voice is the form of the book. The narrator is the older Pip, looking back from a distance of perhaps ten or fifteen years on the events he is describing. The voice is wry, ironic about itself, ashamed of what it used to want, exact about its own snobbery. It does not make excuses for the younger Pip. It also does not condemn him in language harsher than the events themselves are already supplying.

The result is a sustained dramatic irony that runs almost to the end of the novel. The reader sees Pip's snobbery before Pip can see it; the reader sees Pip's affection for Joe before Pip will admit it to himself; the reader sees the small daily cruelties Pip is committing — the cooled welcomes, the avoidances, the one or two evenings he could have spent at the forge and did not — at the moment Pip is committing them, but with the older Pip's quiet acknowledgement framing each.

The technique allowed Dickens to do something he had not quite done before: let a reader watch a single character become wrong about his own life in real time. First-person narrators in English fiction before Great Expectations were generally either unreliable in the ironic-comic mode (Sterne's Tristram Shandy) or earnestly autobiographical (Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dickens's own David Copperfield). Pip is something new. He is reliable about facts and unreliable about meanings, and his older self is the silent reader of his younger self.

The technique would become the dominant form of the modern novel after 1900 — Henry James, Conrad, Proust, Ford Madox Ford, the entire tradition of the unreliable first-person narrator — and Great Expectations is one of the books that taught the form what kind of pressure it could carry. The voice is what holds the moral weight of the novel that no nineteenth-century third-person narrator could have carried without sermonizing.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (the older Pip establishes his voice), Chapter 14 (ashamed of the forge), Chapter 27 (Joe in London), Chapter 57 (the fever and the reckoning).

Pip stops visiting Joe at the forge after he goes to London. When Joe travels up to London once to bring Pip news, Pip is embarrassed by his old clothes and rough manners and addresses him with a stiffness Joe registers and accepts without complaint, and the visit ends with Joe saying it has been a pleasure and going home alone. Pip cannot quite bring himself to write home; he sends money instead, and Biddy writes back politely on Joe's behalf and Pip resents the politeness. He misses his sister's funeral and arrives the day after.

Dickens is unflinching about what that distance does to the people Pip has abandoned and what it does to Pip himself — the small daily cruelties, the way shame poisons even his attempts at decency, the way the gentleman's life he is building requires, for its psychological coherence, that he keep on cooling toward people whose love for him is the firmest thing in his life.

When the truth about Magwitch arrives in Chapter 39, the gentleman's life Pip had been building reveals itself as a debt to a transported convict, paid in his own contempt for everyone who had actually loved him, and the moral weight is more than the structure can carry. Pip falls into a fever, is nursed back to a kind of life by Joe — who has come up to London on the news of his illness, paid his debts, and quietly gone home before Pip is well enough to thank him — and goes home to find Joe and Biddy married.

The novel is the most honest portrait in Victorian fiction of class mobility as a moral injury rather than a triumph. It is the book to read on what is lost when someone leaves where they came from for somewhere supposedly better.

Where to follow it: Chapter 19 (farewell to the marshes), Chapter 27 (Joe's visit to London), Chapter 35 (Mrs. Joe's funeral), Chapter 57 (Joe nurses Pip through the fever).

Miss Havisham was jilted at the altar in her youth — the bridegroom failed to appear at twenty to nine on her wedding morning — and has spent the decades since wearing her wedding dress, leaving the cake on the table, and stopping every clock in the house at the moment of the news. She has also raised, as her adopted daughter, a girl named Estella, whom she has taught from earliest childhood to be beautiful, cold, and incapable of love.

The whole apparatus is a long act of vengeance against the male sex generally and the bridegroom in particular, conducted by training a young woman to make men fall for her and then to break them. The novel is exact about what this system costs everyone inside it. Miss Havisham herself, by the end, is broken open by what she has done — when Estella tells her with absolute clarity that she will love no one, Miss Havisham realizes that the daughter she has raised is incapable of loving even her.

Estella, who has been formed by the system and who tells Pip plainly and repeatedly that she has no heart to give him, is the most honest character in the book about what she is — a young woman who has been turned into a weapon and who knows it. Her marriage to the brutal Bentley Drummle is the entirely predictable consequence of her formation.

Dickens's portrait is the deepest in nineteenth-century fiction of the way trauma passes between generations through the mechanism of revenge — what one person does to a child to make the child carry a wound on the parent's behalf. The novel's quiet insistence is that the system can be partially understood by Estella in the closing chapters, and partially disrupted, but not undone. The transmission can be interrupted. It cannot be reversed.

Where to follow it: Chapter 8 (first visit to Satis House), Chapter 38 (Estella tells Havisham she cannot love), Chapter 44 (Pip confronts Miss Havisham), Chapter 49 (Miss Havisham burns).

For the first thirty-eight chapters of Great Expectations, the reader, like Pip, is allowed to believe that Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and Estella his intended bride. The structure of the plot encourages the reading: Miss Havisham summoned Pip as a child, her lawyer is Jaggers who is also Pip's lawyer, the timing of the legacy seems to fit. Then in Chapter 39, on a stormy night in Pip's London chambers, an old man climbs the stairs out of the rain, and Pip recognizes the convict from the marshes.

Magwitch has come back to England illegally, on pain of execution if discovered, to see what his money has made of Pip. The truth, in the next thirty pages, restructures every chapter that came before. The opening encounter on the marshes is no longer a frightening prologue but the foundational debt of Pip's whole adult life. The convict's gratitude for a piece of pork pie and a file, treasured for sixteen years in the Australian sheep country, has been the engine of Pip's gentility.

Miss Havisham has been using Pip — but as a piece of cruelty against her own male relations and against the entire male sex, not as Estella's intended husband. The plot's whole previous logic falls away. The moral consequence is that Pip's gentlemanly identity was built on a stranger's gratitude rather than on a romance, and the gratitude was attached to a man Pip would have been, only weeks earlier, ashamed to know.

Dickens then does the harder thing. He makes Pip realize what Magwitch is — a man who has loved him from a distance for sixteen years, who has thought of him every day in the sheep country, who has come back to England to risk hanging just to see him — and lets the love work on Pip slowly across the closing chapters, until by Magwitch's death in the prison hospital Pip is sitting by his bed holding his hand. The novel teaches the reader to read it twice. The second reading, knowing where the money came from, is a different book from the first.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (the convict in the churchyard), Chapter 18 (Jaggers announces the fortune), Chapter 39 (Magwitch returns), Chapter 56 (Magwitch dies).