Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
February 7, 1812 – June 9, 1870
• Dickens was born in Portsmouth,
Hampshire to John Dickens, a naval
pay clerk, and his wife Elizabeth
Dickens.
• When he was five, the family moved
to Chatham, Kent.
• When he was ten, the family
relocated to Camden Town in
London.
• His early years were an idyllic time.
He thought himself then as a "very
small and not-over-particularlytaken-care-of boy".
• He talked later in life of his extremely strong
memories of childhood and his continuing
photographic memory of people and events
that helped bring his fiction to life.
• His family was moderately well-off, and he
received some education at a private school
but all that changed when his father, after
spending too much money entertaining and
retaining his social position, was imprisoned
for debt.
• At the age of twelve, Dickens was deemed
old enough to work and began working for
ten hours a day in Warren's boot-blacking
factory, located near the present Charing
Cross railway station.
• He spent his time pasting labels on the jars
of thick polish and earned six shillings a
week. With this money, he had to pay for
his lodging and help to support his family,
which was incarcerated in the nearby
Marshalsea debtors' prison.
• Dickens began work as a law clerk, a junior office
position with potential to become a lawyer.
• He did not like the law as a profession and after a
short time as a court stenographer he became a
journalist, reporting parliamentary debate and
traveling Britain by stagecoach to cover election
campaigns.
• His journalism formed his first collection of pieces
Sketches by Boz and he continued to contribute to
and edit journals for much of his life.
• In his early twenties he made a name for himself
with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers.
Great Expectations
• Dickens wrote and published Great Expectations
in 1860-1861, and though the novel looks back to
an earlier time (1812-1840), the period of
composition itself is noteworthy.
• Great Expectations looks back upon a period of
pre-Victorian development that had become, by
1860, thoroughly historical. However, as a
Victorian novel, Great Expectations is itself the
product of a dynamic moment in history.
Themes of Great Expectations
• Ambition and
SelfImprovement
• Social Class
• Crime, Guilt,
and Innocence
Ambition and SelfImprovement
• Affection, loyalty, and conscience
are more important than social
advancement, wealth, and class.
• Dickens establishes the theme and
shows Pip learning this lesson,
largely by exploring ideas of
ambition and self-improvement—
ideas that quickly become both the
thematic center of the novel and
the psychological mechanism that
encourages much of Pip’s
development.
• At heart, Pip is an idealist; whenever he can
conceive of something that is better than
what he already has, he immediately desires
to obtain the improvement.
– When he sees Satis House, he longs to be a
wealthy gentleman;
– when he thinks of his moral shortcomings, he
longs to be good;
– when he realizes that he cannot read, he longs to
learn how.
– Pip’s desire for self-improvement is the main
source of the novel’s title: because he believes in
the possibility of advancement in life, he has
“great expectations” about his future.
Social Class
• Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens explores
the class system of Victorian England, ranging
from the most wretched criminals (Magwitch) to
the poor peasants of the marsh country (Joe and
Biddy) to the middle class (Pumblechook) to the
very rich (Miss Havisham).
• The theme of social class is central to the novel’s
plot and to the ultimate moral theme of the book—
the inadequacy of material social advancment to
bring true happiness.
• Pip achieves this realization when he is finally
able to understand that, despite the esteem in
which he holds Estella, one’s social status is in no
way connected to one’s real character.
• Drummle, for instance, is an upper-class lout,
while Magwitch, a persecuted convict, has a deep
inner worth.
• Perhaps the most important thing to remember
about the novel’s treatment of social class is that
the class system it portrays is based on the postIndustrial Revolution model of Victorian England.
Dickens generally ignores the nobility and the
hereditary aristocracy in favor of characters whose
fortunes have been earned through commerce.
• The theme of crime, guilt, and innocence is
explored throughout the novel largely through the
characters of the convicts and the criminal lawyer
Jaggers.
• From the handcuffs Joe mends at the smithy to the
gallows at the prison in London, the imagery of
crime and criminal justice pervades the book,
becoming an important symbol of Pip’s inner
struggle to reconcile his own inner moral
conscience with the institutional justice system.
• In general, just as social class becomes a
superficial standard of value that Pip must learn to
look beyond in finding a better way to live his life,
the external trappings of the criminal justice
system (police, courts, jails, etc.) become a
superficial standard of morality that Pip must learn
to look beyond to trust his inner conscience.
Crime, Guilt, and Innocence
• Magwitch, for instance, frightens Pip at first
simply because he is a convict, and Pip feels guilty
for helping him because he is afraid of the police.
By the end of the book, however, Pip has
discovered Magwitch’s inner nobility, and is able
to disregard his external status as a criminal.
Prompted by his conscience, he helps Magwitch to
evade the law and the police.
• As Pip has learned to trust his conscience and to
value Magwitch’s inner character, he has replaced
an external standard of value with an internal one.
The original ending
Dickens’ chose to change the ending of Great
Expectations, because according to one of his
friends, Bulwer-Lytton (who himself was an
author), the ending he had conceived originally
was too unhappy for the public to react favourably
to his book. The ending you read goes like this:
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined
place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago
when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were
rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light
they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting
from her.
Here’s the original, what do you think?
It was four years more, before I saw herself. I had
heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as
being separated from her husband who had used
her with great cruelty, and who had become quite
renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and
meanness. I had heard of the death of her husband
(from an accident consequent on ill-treating a
horse), and of her being married again to a
Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had
once very manfully interposed, on an occasion
when he was in professional attendance on Mr.
Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous
treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire
doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own
personal fortune.
I was in England again -- in London, and walking
along Piccadilly with little Pip -- when a servant
came running after me to ask would I step back to
a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It
was a little pony carriage, which the lady was
driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on
one another. "I am greatly changed, I know; but I
thought you would like to shake hands with
Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let
me kiss it!" (She supposed the child, I think, to be
my child.) I was very glad afterwards to have had
the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and
in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that
suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's
teaching, and had given her a heart to understand
what my heart used to be.
Was Charles Dickens a Christian?
• Because of the Scriptural reference at Magwitch's
death as well as other Biblical nods in Great
Expectations, students often ask if Charles
Dickens was a Christian—especially in light of the
breakup of his marriage.
• The short answer is God only knows.
• However Dickens would have defined himself as a
Christian and many others have pronounced him a
Christian.
He Actually Wrote an Account of Jesus’ Life
which he forbade to be sold.
• In a letter described in the introduction
to his The Life of Our Lord, as "perhaps
the last words written by Dickens" he
describes his own tendency to
incorporate but not preach his beliefs in
his writings in a time when many used
their faith as a way to political and
economic advantage:
• “I have always striven in my writings
to express veneration for the life and
lessons of Our Savior, because I feel
it. . . But I have never made
proclamation
Thus this is not a Simple Question to Answer:
• One, we scholars know that he was far from perfect.
Late in his life Dickens’ marriage floundered. This is
common enough, but he placed the blame for the
breakup publicly, in the magazine or which he was the
editor, entirely upon her. Even among his closest
friends, the opinion was held that he behaved badly
towards Elizabeth who in spite of this remained
respectful of him and later of his memory throughout
their separate lives. On the other hand, claims that
Dickens had an affair with the young (the age of his
daughter) actress Lawless, is more the product of a
sexualized modern mindset than a Victorian one. Also
one terrible event should not define an individual’s faith
not for King David and not for Charles Dickens.
• Second, he was a Unitarian, which for many conservative
believers means a belief system without any overt claims
of Christ’s divinity. However, his friend Foster maintains
that he was drawn to the movement because of its active
interest in the poor and that he, in fact, remained orthodox
in his belief throughout his life. It is true that especially in
the Victorian period there were many Unitarians who
remained orthodox and in fact evangelical in their
Christian beliefs. As for evangelicals, especially
Methodists, Dickens had formed a very low opinion of
them early in his life for their tendency to allow anyone
who claimed to spirit to be a minister. Meanwhile he did
not trust the high church tendencies within the very
formal elements of the Church of England. His friend
Foster while maintaining the safety of Dickens' belief,
rather ambiguously refers to it as being characterized by a
"depth of sentiment rather than clearness of faith" (ii,
147).
• Third in a time when faith was often used as a way to
raise oneself up socially, Dickens refused to make
public pronouncements about his belief system. In fact
not long before he died he was queried by a clergyman
about the ideas of Christianity within his novels. In
response he wrote: “I have always striven in my
writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of
Our Savior, because I feel it. . . But I have never made
proclamation of this from the housetops” (Qtd. in the
Forward to Life of Our Lord 4). Yet in spite of these
questions Dickens seems to have held to the last a
reliance upon faith When Dickens bade farewell to his
sixteen-year-old son Plorn, who was off to Australia, he
wrote: "I put a New Testament among your books, for
the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes
that made me write an easy account of it for you, when
you were a little child...." (Qtd in Johnson, ii: 1100).
In spite of this vagueness of orthodoxy there
is no debate among scholars that Christian
principles and Christian images of at the
center of Dickens’ attitudes towards the poor
and towards the reclamation of individuals.
• Steven Marcus, the famous Dickens scholar,
says forthrightly that of course Dickens was a
Christian.”
• The English writer George Orwell said of
Charles Dickens: “he ‘believed’ undoubtedly.