Context: Victorian Class & Social Mobility
Dickens and the Class System
Charles Dickens published Great Expectations as a weekly serial in All the Year Round between December 1860 and August 1861. Victorian Britain was rigidly divided by class. At the top sat the aristocracy and landed gentry — families who inherited wealth. Below them, a growing middle class of merchants and lawyers aspired to climb higher. At the bottom, the working class struggled in conditions Dickens knew firsthand: when he was twelve, his father was imprisoned for debt, and young Charles was forced to work in a blacking factory.
This autobiography matters. Pip’s shame about his working-class origins, his desperate desire to become a gentleman, and his eventual realisation that wealth does not equal worth all mirror Dickens’s own complicated relationship with class.
Victorian society had three rigid tiers: aristocracy/gentry (inherited wealth), middle class (earned wealth), and working class/poor. Dickens drew on his own childhood poverty when creating Pip’s shame about his origins at the forge.
The ‘Gentleman’ Ideal
In Victorian culture, a gentleman was defined by wealth, education, manners, and the absence of manual labour. This ideal shaped everything from marriage prospects to legal rights.
Dickens uses Great Expectations to interrogate this ideal ruthlessly. Pip believes becoming a gentleman will make him worthy of Estella’s love. Instead, his ‘great expectations’ make him a snob — ashamed of Joe Gargery, the man who raised him with genuine kindness. The true gentleman of the novel is Joe himself: no wealth, no education, no status, but absolute moral integrity.
Compeyson and Magwitch committed the same crime, but at trial Compeyson — who dressed like a gentleman — received seven years while Magwitch received fourteen. As Magwitch tells Pip: “I noticed first of all what a gentleman Compeyson looked, wi’ his curly hair and his black clothes and his white pocket-handkercher, and what a common sort of a wretch I looked.” Same crime, different punishments — purely because of appearance and class.
Social Mobility and Self-Improvement
Victorian Britain offered limited pathways for social mobility. Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) promoted the idea that effort could raise anyone. But Dickens complicates this: Pip’s rise is funded by a convict’s money, and his ‘improvement’ makes him worse — more snobbish, less kind.
Biddy represents genuine self-improvement. She educates herself, becoming a schoolteacher through intelligence and determination, without losing her kindness. Where Pip’s rise corrupts him, Biddy’s enriches her.
Dickens challenges the belief that social climbing equals moral improvement. Pip’s wealth makes him worse. Joe and Biddy — who remain working class — are the novel’s moral centres. True worth comes from character, not class.
Crime, Punishment, and the Law
The criminal justice system pervades the novel. It opens on the marshes near a prison hulk. Magwitch is an escaped prisoner. Jaggers washes his hands after dealing with criminals. Newgate Prison looms over London.
Transportation to penal colonies was a common sentence. Magwitch is transported for life; returning illegally risks hanging. Dickens exposes the brutal disproportion of Victorian punishment.
Dickens was the most popular novelist of his age. Serialised weekly, Great Expectations needed cliffhangers, but beyond entertainment Dickens wanted middle-class readers to question their assumptions. First-person narration forces the reader to share Pip’s shame, ambition, and painful realisation.
Structure: The Bildungsroman
The novel divides into three stages: Stage 1 (Chs 1–19) — childhood at the forge; Stage 2 (Chs 20–39) — gentleman in London; Stage 3 (Chs 40–59) — disillusionment and moral recovery. The structure mirrors innocence, corruption, and redemption.
Dickens uses first-person retrospective narration. The adult Pip looks back with regret and wisdom, commenting on his younger self’s mistakes even as we experience them.