Charles Dickens Many of the events from Dickenss

early life are mirrored in Great Expectations, which,

apart from David Copperfield, is his most
autobiographical novel. In form, Great Expectations
fits a pattern popular in nineteenth-century European
fiction: the bildungsroman, or novel depicting growth
and personal development, generally a transition
from boyhood to manhood such as that experienced
by Pip. The genre was popularized by Goethe with
his book Wilhelm Meister (1794-1796) and became
prevalent in England with such books as Daniel
Defoes Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Bronts Jane
Eyre, and Dickenss own David Copperfield. Each of
these works, like Great Expectations, depicts a
process of maturation and self-discovery through
experience as a protagonist moves from childhood to
adulthood. Pip, the novels protagonist, lives in the
marsh country, works at a job he hates, considers
himself too good for his surroundings, and
experiences material success in London at a very
early age, exactly as Dickens himself did. In addition,
one of the novels most appealing characters,
Wemmick, is a law clerk, and the law, justice, and the
courts are all important components of the story.
Great Expectations is set in early Victorian England,
a time when great social changes were sweeping the

nation. The Industrial Revolution of the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had
transformed the social landscape, enabling
capitalists and manufacturers to amass huge
fortunes. Although social class was no longer entirely
dependent on the circumstances of ones birth, the
divisions between rich and poor remained nearly as
wide as ever. London, a teeming mass of humanity,
lit by gas lamps at night and darkened by black
clouds from smokestacks during the day, formed a
sharp contrast with the nations sparsely populated
rural areas. More and more people moved from the
country to the city in search of greater economic
opportunity. Throughout England, the manners of the
upper class were very strict and conservative:
gentlemen and ladies were expected to have
thorough classical educations and to behave
appropriately in innumerable social situations. These
conditions defined Dickenss time, and they make
themselves felt in almost every facet of Great
Expectations. Pips sudden rise from country laborer
to city gentleman forces him to move from one social
extreme to another while dealing with the strict rules
and expectations that governed Victorian England.
Ironically, this novel about the desire for wealth and
social advancement was written partially out of

economic necessity. Dickens conceived of Great

Expectations as a means of restoring his
publications fortunes. The book is still immensely
popular a century and a half later.The tone is comic,
cheerful, satirical, wry, critical, sentimental, dark,
dramatic, foreboding, Gothic, sympathetic.The
themes are: ambition and the desire for selfimprovement (social, economic, educational, and
moral); guilt, criminality, and innocence; maturation
and the growth from childhood to adulthood; the
importance of affection, loyalty, and sympathy over
social advancement and class superiority; social
class; the difficulty of maintaining superficial moral
and social categories in a constantly changing world
The motifs : crime and criminality; disappointed
expectations; the connection between weather or
atmosphere and dramatic events; doubles (two
convicts, two secret benefactors, two invalids, etc.)
The symbols :The stopped clocks at Satis House
symbolize Miss Havishams attempt to stop time; the
many objects relating to crime and guilt symbolize
the theme of guilt and innocence; Satis House
represents the upper-class world to which Pip longs
to belong; Bentley Drummle represents the
grotesque caprice of the upper class; Joe represents
conscience, affection, loyalty, and simple good

nature; the marsh mists represent danger and

ambiguity.
Analysis of Major Characters
Pip As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations
presents the growth and development of a single
character, Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and
to the world as Pip. As the focus of the
bildungsroman, Pip is by far the most important
character in Great Expectations: he is both the
protagonist, whose actions make up the main plot of
the novel, and the narrator, whose thoughts and
attitudes shape the readers perception of the story.
As a result, developing an understanding of Pips
character is perhaps the most important step in
understanding Great Expectations. Because Pip is
narrating his story many years after the events of the
novel take place, there are really two Pips in Great
Expectations: Pip the narrator and Pip the character
the voice telling the story and the person acting it
out. Dickens takes great care to distinguish the two
Pips, imbuing the voice of Pip the narrator with
perspective and maturity while also imparting how
Pip the character feels about what is happening to
him as it actually happens. This skillfully executed
distinction is perhaps best observed early in the
book, when Pip the character is a child; here, Pip the

narrator gently pokes fun at his younger self, but also

enables us to see and feel the story through his
eyes. As a character, Pips two most important traits
are his immature, romantic idealism and his innately
good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep
desire to improve himself and attain any possible
advancement, whether educational, moral, or social.
His longing to marry Estella and join the upper
classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his
longing to learn to read and his fear of being
punished for bad behavior: once he understands
ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip
does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip
the narrator judges his own past actions extremely
harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds
but angrily castigating himself for bad ones. As a
character, however, Pips idealism often leads him to
perceive the world rather narrowly, and his tendency
to oversimplify situations based on superficial values
leads him to behave badly toward the people who
care about him. When Pip becomes a gentleman, for
example, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a
gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to
treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and coldly. On the
other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and
sympathetic young man, a fact that can be witnessed

in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the

book (helping Magwitch, secretly buying Herberts
way into business, etc.) and his essential love for all
those who love him. Pips main line of development
in the novel may be seen as the process of learning
to place his innate sense of kindness and conscience
above his immature idealism. Not long after meeting
Miss Havisham and Estella, Pips desire for
advancement largely overshadows his basic
goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his
idealistic wishes seem to have been justified, and he
gives himself over to a gentlemanly life of idleness.
But the discovery that the wretched Magwitch, not
the wealthy Miss Havisham, is his secret benefactor
shatters Pips oversimplified sense of his worlds
hierarchy. The fact that he comes to admire
Magwitch while losing Estella to the brutish
nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize
that ones social position is not the most important
quality one possesses, and that his behavior as a
gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who
care about him most. Once he has learned these
lessons, Pip matures into the man who narrates the
novel, completing the bildungsroman.