Themes

Social Class

The identities of the characters in Great Expectations are mostly based on social class. Accordingly, the characters’ social standing is determined by their professions and the amount of wealth they own. Pip’s journey through the novel can be traced through his class aspirations.

At the beginning of the novel, Pip is an apprentice to Joe, a blacksmith. Pie and Joe belong to the working class. Pip, however, ascends the class ladder gradually. His story is one of upward mobility. Pip’s efforts to assimilate with the upper class are not straightforward. They are accompanied by internal struggles and he finds himself questioning his outlook toward life. Toward the end of the novel, he realizes that it is best to understand people through their actions rather than their social standing.

Other than the lower, middle, and upper classes, nineteenth-century Britain was also home to the “underclass.” This class consisted of people too uneducated and poor to belong to any of the other classes. Members of this class were also excluded from traditional occupations and had to resort to stealing and petty crimes.

Coming of Age

Great Expectations is a bildungsroman or a coming-of-age novel: it focuses on the protagonists’ emotional, moral, and physical growth. The novel follows Pip’s transformation from a young, ambitious orphan to a humble gentleman. Through Joe, Pip realizes that the working class is not necessarily a morally corrupt group. His interactions with Compeyson teaches him that there can be educated crooks, too. When he learns that Magwitch is his benefactor, Pip understands that one cannot judge a person based on their appearance.

The novel features many orphans and lower class children blighted by poor, and sometimes abusive, parenting. In doing so, Great Expectations paints an unflinchingly truthful picture of Victorian England. Estella’s character reveals that even the young were encouraged to mistreat the lower classes.

Crime and Law

The judicial system in Victorian England was extremely punitive in nature. Convicts were sentenced to long prison sentences; death sentences were also very common. Prison reforms were only beginning to take place at this time, and the legal system focused more on punishment than on rehabilitation. “Transportation” was another kind of punishment common during this era. This involved shipping prisoners away to colonies, as was the case with Magwitch. Notably, Dickens was a staunch critic of the British legal system.

Magwitch’s example also shows that the courts in Victorian England were easily swayed by class biases: though Compeyson had played a bigger part in the crimes the two committed together, Magwitch gets the harsher and longer sentence since he belonged to a lower class than Compeyson. The end of the novel is a testament to Magwitch’s innate goodness, but Pip is the only one who is able to recognize it.

Death sentences were public spectacles, and this represents the dehumanization of criminals in Victorian England.