Great Expectations

Great Expectations is the novel Dickens wrote when he was fifty, at the height of his powers, and it shows. Every element of the Victorian novel he had been developing for twenty years — the orphan hero, the eccentric supporting cast, the London underworld, the fog of class anxiety — arrives here at peak efficiency. But what makes the novel more than a brilliant exercise is what it is about underneath the plot machinery: shame.

Pip is ashamed of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith who raised him, because Joe is simple and good and working-class. He is ashamed of his origins, his hands, his accent. The novel's great subject is the way aspirational class mobility requires the betrayal of loyalty, and how Pip's "great expectations" — the mysterious fortune, the London education, the entry into gentility — are built on self-falsification. He does not know, for most of the novel, where his money comes from. When he learns, it destroys the story he has been telling himself about who he is.

Dickens was writing autobiography here without saying so. His own childhood humiliation — the blacking factory, the debtors' prison, the poverty he spent his adult life outrunning — saturates Pip's shame. He knew what it was to be ashamed of where he came from, to want desperately to be something other than what he was, and to discover that the thing you ran from had never left.

The novel also contains one of fiction's greatest gallery of supporting characters — Jaggers, Wemmick, Herbert Pocket, Miss Havisham, Magwitch — and one of its greatest mysteries: the true nature of expectation, and what it means when it fails.

Pip (Philip Pirrip) — the narrator, looking back at himself as a young man with the rueful honesty of someone who has lived with his errors. His self-awareness about his snobbery does not excuse it; it deepens our understanding of how clearly he saw what he was doing while he was doing it. He is one of fiction's most relatable protagonists precisely because his faults are ordinary ones: vanity, ingratitude, the desire to be seen as better than one's origins.

Joe Gargery — the blacksmith, Pip's brother-in-law and protector, and the novel's moral center. He is illiterate, gentle, and completely loyal. Dickens gives him one of the novel's greatest speeches — his explanation of why he never told Mrs. Joe to stop beating Pip — in the simplest language in the book. Joe is not simple. He is the measure against which everything else is measured.

Miss Havisham — jilted on her wedding day, stopped all the clocks, still wearing the rotting wedding dress: one of Victorian fiction's most famous images and one of Dickens's most sustained studies in what happens when grief becomes a lifestyle. She is monstrous and also pitiable. Her use of Estella as an instrument of revenge against men is the novel's darkest thread.

Abel Magwitch — the convict who terrified young Pip in the graveyard and who — decades later — reveals himself as the source of Pip's fortune. His return is the novel's great reversal: the man Pip has spent his life trying to escape from is the man who made his escape possible. Dickens gives him the novel's most moving arc: a man who, having been discarded by society, found a use for his money and his life in making a gentleman.

Estella — raised by Miss Havisham as a weapon, trained not to feel, and genuinely incapable — for most of the novel — of the love Pip cannot stop wanting from her. Her final scenes depend on which ending Dickens gave her: the original (bitter, realistic) or the revised (ambiguous, slightly hopeful). Both matter.

No. 1 · Magwitch's return. The novel's great structural pivot: Pip, now a London gentleman, receives a visitor who reveals himself as the convict from the marshes — and as the source of Pip's fortune. Dickens executes this reversal with complete technical control: the recognition scene, Pip's horror, Magwitch's simple pride. The scene destroys everything Pip has believed about himself and begins the process of making him actually admirable.

No. 2 · Wemmick's castle. Wemmick, Jaggers's clerk, maintains an absolute division between his work self — calculating, hard, professional — and his home self, who lives in a Gothic miniature castle with a drawbridge and cares for his deaf "Aged Parent." Dickens uses the comedy of Wemmick's double life to make a serious argument about what industrial capitalism does to a person's inner life, and what resources of warmth people maintain in private against the demands of the market.

No. 3 · The ending (and the other ending). Dickens originally wrote an ending in which Pip and Estella meet briefly years later and part — she remarried, he alone, a clean break. He was persuaded by Bulwer-Lytton to revise it into the ambiguous meeting in the ruined Satis House garden. The revised ending is more famous and more discussed; the original is more consistent with the novel's argument. Every edition should include both. The choice between them is the most useful discussion question the novel generates.

Read this if you are…

• Anyone beginning their Dickens reading: this is the best entry point, combining his greatest strengths (character, atmosphere, plot) with his most focused thematic argument.
• Readers interested in the Victorian novel's engagement with class mobility, shame, and the cost of aspiration.
• Anyone who has felt the pull of self-reinvention and the complicated feelings it produces toward people who knew you before.

Skip it if you are…

• Looking for Dickens's social panorama at full width. This is focused and personal; for the sprawl, try Bleak House.
• Troubled by sentimentality in the final act. Dickens moves toward forgiveness in ways that some readers find earned and others find unearned. Joe's scenes with Pip in London are genuinely moving; a few late scenes tip toward the saccharine.

• Joe is not a comic figure. He is written with the markers of comic simplicity but his function is moral, not comic. Every time Pip is ashamed of him, the shame is on Pip. Keep this orientation.
• Track Pip's hands. From Estella's first contemptuous reference to his "coarse hands" to the moment when Magwitch grasps them, hands in this novel carry the novel's class argument. Dickens is deliberate about this.
• Read both endings. Any edition that only includes one is giving you an incomplete picture. The choice between them is the novel's most productive open question.
• Jaggers is the novel's darkest figure. His power, his professionalism, his household: Dickens puts more darkness into Jaggers than into any ostensible villain in the novel. Pay attention to what his domestic arrangements reveal.

• Charles Dickens — David Copperfield (1850). The autobiographical companion: the earlier, warmer, more sprawling novel that covers similar ground with less compression. Dickens called Copperfield his favorite child; Great Expectations is his most precise.
• George Eliot — The Mill on the Floss (1860). Published one year before; another novel about origins, aspiration, and the cost of running from where you came from. Eliot's Maggie Tulliver and Dickens's Pip are in dialogue about what it means to want more than your circumstances offer.
• Henry James — The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The American counterpart: what a fortune and a sense of self-determination can make a person do wrong. James's Isabel Archer and Pip share the quality of making legible mistakes with full intelligence.

1. Pip is ashamed of Joe throughout most of the novel, and he knows he should not be. How does Dickens render the coexistence of Pip's self-awareness and his continued snobbery? Is this psychologically accurate? Have you felt something similar?
2. Magwitch funded Pip's education and London life because he wanted to "make a gentleman" — to do with money what society would not do for him. What does the novel say about this project? Is Magwitch's satisfaction in Pip's gentility moving or ironic?
3. Miss Havisham stopped all the clocks at the moment of her abandonment and has lived in the arrested moment ever since. What is Dickens's argument about grief that becomes a lifestyle? Is she a villain?
4. The novel has two endings. Which is more honest? Which does the novel's argument require? What does the choice tell you about what Dickens believed about hope and realism?
5. Wemmick's absolute division between his professional self and his domestic self is played for comedy but taken seriously. What is Dickens saying about the psychological cost of Victorian professional life?
6. "Great expectations" — the phrase, not just the title — implies both anticipation and entitlement. By the end of the novel, what has Pip learned about the difference between expecting and earning? What has he actually gained?