Key themes
- Class, shame and aspiration
- The illusion of gentility
- Crime, guilt and redemption
About this book
A blacksmith's boy, a mysterious fortune and the question of what really makes a gentleman — Dickens at his most personal.
Published serially in 1860–1861, Great Expectations is the most autobiographically charged of Dickens's novels, drawing on his own experience of poverty and social shame.
Discussion questions
- Pip spends much of the novel ashamed of his origins and the people who love him most. How does Dickens make us sympathise with a narrator who is not always sympathetic?
- Miss Havisham and Magwitch are both figures of arrested time — but in very different ways. What do they have in common, and what does each represent?
- The novel's famous ambiguous ending (Dickens rewrote it) — do you prefer one ending over the other, and what does each say about the novel's moral?
- Estella is raised to break hearts as an act of revenge. By the novel's end, is she a victim, a perpetrator, or both?
- Dickens is often described as a critic of class rather than class itself — he attacks snobbery but not the system that produces it. Is that a fair criticism of the novel?
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