Context: Victorian Class & Social Mobility
Why Context Matters for Great Expectations
In the Edexcel exam, you will not be assessed on context through a separate assessment objective — but understanding the Victorian world Dickens wrote about is essential for analysing why characters behave as they do, and what Dickens is criticising. Great Expectations is, at its core, a novel about class — who has it, who wants it, and what people will do to get it.
The Victorian Class System
Victorian England was rigidly divided by social class. At the top sat the aristocracy and landed gentry, who inherited wealth and considered themselves naturally superior. Below them, the growing middle class — merchants, lawyers, bankers — had money but not the social prestige of old families. At the bottom, the working class and the poor lived in cramped, unsanitary conditions, often one illness or lost job away from the workhouse.
What made this system so powerful was the belief that class was fixed. You were born into your station, and moving upward was seen as unnatural or even suspicious. Pip’s desire to become a gentleman is not simply ambition — it is a rejection of the class he was born into, which Dickens presents as both understandable and deeply damaging.
Victorian society believed class was fixed at birth. Dickens challenges this by showing that moral worth has nothing to do with social status — Joe Gargery, the humble blacksmith, is the most genuinely good character in the novel.
Self-Improvement and the “Gentleman” Ideal
The Victorian period saw a growing belief in self-improvement. Samuel Smiles’ bestselling book Self-Help (1859) argued that anyone could rise through hard work and good character. But Dickens complicates this. Pip’s “self-improvement” is not about becoming a better person — it is about becoming a richer person. He learns to speak, dress, and behave like a gentleman, but in doing so he becomes snobbish, ungrateful, and ashamed of Joe.
Dickens asks a sharp question: what is a true gentleman? Is it someone with fine clothes and education, or someone with kindness and loyalty? Estella says at the end that “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching,” and the same is true of Pip. His moral education comes not from London society, but from loss, guilt, and the love of people he once looked down on.
Charles Dickens knew the shame of poverty first-hand. When he was twelve, his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, and the young Dickens was sent to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory, pasting labels onto pots of boot polish. The humiliation never left him. Like Pip, Dickens rose from poverty to respectability — but unlike Pip, Dickens never forgot where he came from. He channelled his anger into his novels, exposing the cruelty of a system that punished people simply for being poor.
Great Expectations is partly autobiographical. Pip’s shame about his origins, his desperate desire to be “somebody,” and his eventual realisation that wealth does not equal goodness all echo Dickens’ own journey. The novel was written in 1860–61, when Dickens was at the height of his fame, looking back on his younger self with both sympathy and criticism.
Crime and Punishment in Victorian England
The criminal justice system in Dickens’ time was brutal. Over two hundred offences carried the death penalty at the start of the nineteenth century. Transportation to penal colonies in Australia was used for serious crimes, and returned convicts like Magwitch faced execution if caught back in England. Prisons were overcrowded, and poverty was itself treated almost as a crime — the workhouse system, introduced by the 1834 Poor Law, deliberately made life miserable to discourage people from seeking help.
Dickens was deeply critical of this system. In Great Expectations, Magwitch is both a criminal and a victim — driven to crime by poverty, punished savagely, and yet capable of extraordinary generosity. His question — “But what the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn’t I?” — challenges the Victorian belief that criminals were simply wicked people who deserved what they got.
Magwitch’s line “I must put something into my stomach, mustn’t I?” directly challenges Victorian attitudes to crime and poverty. Dickens suggests that society creates criminals by denying the poor any chance of an honest life.
Great Expectations was published in weekly instalments in Dickens’ own magazine, All the Year Round, from December 1860 to August 1861. Serialisation shaped the novel’s structure: each instalment ended with a cliffhanger to keep readers buying the next issue. This explains the novel’s dramatic reveals — Magwitch’s return as the benefactor, for example, was designed to shock weekly readers just as much as it shocks Pip.
Serialisation also meant Dickens could respond to reader feedback. He famously changed the ending of Great Expectations after his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton argued that the original bleak conclusion was too depressing. The revised ending — “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place” — is deliberately ambiguous, leaving readers to decide whether Pip and Estella truly find happiness.
The Novel’s Structure: Three Stages of Pip’s Expectations
Great Expectations is divided into three “stages” that mirror Pip’s development. Stage one covers his childhood on the marshes, his encounters with Magwitch and Miss Havisham, and the announcement of his expectations. Stage two follows his life as a gentleman in London, his growing snobbery, and his deteriorating relationship with Joe. Stage three brings disillusionment — the revelation of Magwitch as his benefactor, Pip’s guilt, and his eventual moral redemption. Dickens uses the Bildungsroman structure to show that true growth comes not from wealth, but from suffering and self-knowledge.