Since its first publication Great Expectations has remained immensely popular due to its rich characterization and intense plot with suspense, mystery and romance intertwined. Dickens’s childhood left a lasting impression on him giving the children in his novels sympathy and understanding, especially in the case of Pip. The novels other vividly wild characters include Miss Havisham, the half-demented old woman living by herself with her ward and niece Estella since she was jilted, Joe Gargery the kind-hearted blacksmith, and Madgwitch, the convict.
Dickens was not only a master novelist but also a humanitarian. His novels draw attention to the inequalities in the Victorian society. In Great Expectations he exposes the major contrast between rich and poor, the brutal treatment of convicts, as well as the cruelty and corruption of institutions. Victorian higher society showed no indifference to the underprivileged. Dickens portrayed you this and left you with a deeper understanding of justice and social responsibility.
Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, the main character in Great Expectations and whose life you follow throughout the novel, lived with his sister and her husband Joe Gargery in the blacksmiths house when he became an orphan. His sister felt responsible for him but did not show that she wanted him to be there with her. It is to Joe Gargery that Pip is apprenticed.
The way that Joe Gargery and Pip speak is very common, showing us that they have a poor education therefore being of low social class. Dickens writes speech the way that his characters have spoken, sometimes missing off letters or changing spellings to make the written word sound like the word that was said.
“…conwict…
…Manners is manners, but still your elth’s your elth.”
At the beginning of chapter eight, when Pip is sat with Mr Pumblechook, he is repeatedly tested with his knowledge of times tables and figures while Mr Pumblechook “sat guessing nothing”. At ten o’clock they started for Miss Havishams, once stood outside the gate, Mr Pumblechook said “And fourteen?” but Pip pretended not to hear. Estella let Pip through the gates but Mr Pumblechook was turned away quite rudely by Estella who called after Pip. Mr Pumblechook tells Pip not to be naughty or rude to the nice people who had invited him there to play, he acts as if it is a privilege to be asked to play at Miss Havishams house. Pip didn’t really want to be there but had to represent his family for the money that could be inherited from Miss Havisham.
“Boy! Let your behaviour here be a credit to those who brought you up by hand!”
Whilst Pip is visiting Miss Havisham in her house, chapter eight, he discovers another sort of life. Everything is strange and new there and he realises that there is a different kind of life to the one that he had been used to all those years. Pip is met at the gates to the house by Estella, who had been raised by Miss Havisham to be a heart-breaking beautiful young lady. Estella treats him like a peasant even though Pip is dressed in his best Sunday clothes and at first sees himself as no less than Estella and falls in love with this distant beautiful young girl. By continually referring to Pip as “boy” Estella reinforces her social status, she is of higher social class than Pip and so has no reason to refer to him by his name. She is no older than Pip but by calling Pip “boy” she allows herself to become more important than him, Pip accepts what she does and calls her “miss” as though she were a woman. Pip realises that he cannot call Estella by her name, but refers to her as “miss”. Again, this shows the social contrast between Estella and Pip. Pip is not only being polite to her like he has always been told, but he is also showing respect to someone he recognises as superior to him in social class.
“…of this house, miss?”
“…its names, boy.”
Chapter eight is a very important chapter for Pip. Miss Havishams house is where Pip becomes aware of the difficulty surrounding social mobility in Victorian society and where he discovers that he is only a small insignificant part of the world. When Pip meets Miss Havisham he is told to play, like he had only been brought there for her amusement, as an insight to how common people go about every day life. Pip finds it hard to play by orders in front of a woman he had never met before. Finally Pip and Estella are made to play cards, after some argument from Estella using the fact that Pip is nothing but a “common labouring-boy” as an excuse not to play, and Miss Havisham realises how ignorant and common he is. Pip can play nothing but ‘Beggar My Neighbour’, which is a common easy card game with simple rules. Estella does her best to make Pip cry by saying things such as;
“He calls the knaves jacks, this boy!
…and what coarse hands he has. And what thick boots!”
As though he is not worthy to be even seen by her, let alone talking or playing cards with her, he is too stupid and too common. Her crude, harsh remarks succeed in making Pip cry, and when Miss Havisham tells him he can leave, he runs out into the garden and cries against the wall.
Pip is made to tell Miss Havisham what he thinks of her and Estella. He is pushed to reveal his true feelings for Estella and is made to look stupid once again after he tells Miss Havisham that he thinks Estella is pretty even though she had been so mean to him.
“You say nothing of her. She says many hard things of you,
but you say nothing of her. What do you think of her?
…I think she is very proud.
…I think she is very pretty.”
Pip also tells Miss Havisham that he thinks Estella is “very insulting”, at which point Dickens mentions that “she was looking at him then, with a look of supreme aversion”. Pip starts to fall in love with Estella even though she constantly shows her utter hatred for him.
This chapter foreshadows the unrequited love between Pip and Estella that has yet to come. Pip has had his first taste of how cruel other people can be to him just because of the way he lives and the way he was brought up. Pip tells Joe of his sadness at being a commoner later that day back at the forge, after lying to his sister and not wanting to tell her a thing about the day he had had (chapter nine). Pip understands for the first time that there are people who will look down on him as a “common labouring-boy” if he remains a blacksmith’s apprentice.
Later in the story (chapter eighteen) Pip becomes aware that he has a benefactor giving him a large amount of money to move to London and better his education. Mr Jaggers, Joe and Pip agree that Matthew Pocket, the man talked about around Miss Havisham's table a long time previous, would be his tutor. Mr. Jaggers offers Joe compensation for the loss of Pips services but he refuses it. They went home and spread the exciting news and sat around and talked of it. Pip had mixed feelings about Biddy and Joe’s reactions to his news and he went to bed anxious for his new life as a gentleman.
In chapter five of volume two, Pip goes back to London several times and asks Mr Jaggers for enough money to get a permanent room at the Bernard Inn, and for a few pieces of furniture to furnish it with. Pip wants to get rid of his low social class roots and permanently become a gentleman living in London.
In chapter twenty-seven, Pip receives a letter from Joe asking to meet him the next day at his house. The letter was not written by Joe because he can’t write, Biddy had to write the letter for him.
“I write this by request of Mr Gargery…
P.S. He wishes me most particular to write what larks…”
Pip did not want to see him, but because of the short notice, he had to. Pip looked forward to Joe’s coming with;
“…considerable disturbance, some mortification and a keen sense of incongruity.
If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money.”
When Joe arrives he is uncomfortable with Pip and calls him “Sir.” They notice that a lot has changed between them and Pip isn’t the same little boy who was sent off to Miss Havishams to amuse her. The language between them shows a definite difference in their educations.
“Joe, how are you, Joe?
Pip, how air you, Pip?”
Pip acts like a gentleman and offers to take Joes hat, Joe ignores this and lays it on the floor between them then grabs both Pips hands and “worked them up and down, as if I had been the last-patented pump.”. Joe hasn’t changed at all to when Pip saw him last and Pip hates the way that he is acting. Pip has become a snob, taking the most petty things and changing them into something horrendous.
“I thought he never would have done wiping his feet,
and that I must have gone out to lift him off the mat, but at last he came in.”
When Herbert enters the room he presents his hand to Joe, who backs away and says;
“Your servant, sir, which I hope as you and Pip.”
Joe feels that these two men are far more important than him, he being a lowly blacksmith of working class being their slave, their “servant”. Joe goes on to comment on their apartment, saying that;
“I would not keep a pig in it myself - not in the case that
I wished him to fatten wholesome and eat with a meller favour on him.”
This is his way of giving his “flattering testimony to the merits” of their apartment in the nicest way Joe could think to say it. Pip notices that Joe has a tendency to call him sir. When Herbert offers Joe tea or coffee Joe thinks that he should not have an option but will have “whichever is most agreeable to” the others.
Dickens shows that Joe is ultimately very uneasy; he does not know what to do with his hat and keeps dropping it, his clothes are his best but disgusting for a ‘gentleman’ to be seen in. Pip is embarrassed by Joe. This chapter shows how much of a vain snob that Pip has become. He cannot even stand to be in the same room as the man that brought him up. Pip knows he used to be as common as Joe and is ashamed by it, he is too much of a gentleman to know Joe.
The final paragraph in this chapter is one of the most moving in the entire novel. Pip realises that Joe has gone, perhaps out of his life forever. Pip thinks that although Joe would never become a gentleman, there was a “simple dignity” in him. Joe says that if there had been any fault that day then it had been his, Joe feels out of place, a muttering working class fool in the land of kings. Before Pip could go after Joe and say something reassuring to him about how they had acted, Joe was gone. The overall emotive effect of the concluding paragraph of this chapter was sympathy for Joe. You could see that Joe was trying his hardest to fit into a role that he could never play, but it wasn’t working, the other characters realised this but they did nothing, making Joe feel even more of an outsider.
Dickens expressed the division that was now between the two characters, the working class Joe and the high social class gentleman Pip were in two completely separate worlds. Dickens showed that Pip was acting similarly to the way that Miss Havisham and Estella had acted to him, he remembers how much he detested it and was sorry for treating Joe so badly.
The language that Dickens used throughout this novel gives depth to the characters. The non-standard English used for Joe’s speech shows that he is of a lower class than the Queens English-speaking Miss Havisham, Estella and Pip. Joe says such things as;
“Which you have that growed, and that swelled, and that gentlefolked…”
While other higher class character use standard English in their speech;
“Yes, but it is meant more than it is said. It meant, when it was given,
that whoever had this house could want nothing else.”
Dickens often got his own view across in his writing with parts of his sentences hyphenated. Complex sentences gave his point. In this sentence he says that children who die at birth die “exceedingly early” in the struggle for their place on earth. Children in the Victorian era often died of complications at birth or childhood maladies. Many children in his own family had died at birth, although none of his children did.
“…little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for…”
Throughout the novel Dickens reflects social class and the differences between the rich and poor in the Victorian era. The author used his knowledge of the time and his life experiences to write his novels. Some parts of the story were from his heart, all his thoughts and feelings went into giving the reader an insight to the problems of the society at that time and what all people had to face. I think he hoped that by writing about how characters of two different social status interacted that he would perhaps change the views of people to be more accepting to others.
Personally, I like this novel. I think that the way it is written gives the reader a real insight to the Victorian social awareness and how people lived by strict rules. There are some really emotional parts of this story that even today people can relate too; the different type of people that there are all over the world and people’s views of them, and how wrong they actually are. I think people could learn from the lessons in this novel and the insight it gives into social standing.
