Pip
Narrator whose shame is the novel’s moral weather.
Realism & Victorian · Novel · 1861
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Pip is lifted from the marshes by a hidden benefactor and learns how expensive gentility can be. The convict on the graveyard is the book’s first and last truth.
Bildungsroman
Characters
Magwitch
The transported man whose money makes a gentleman and undoes a fantasy.
Miss Havisham
Stopped time in a wedding dress, educating Estella in ice.
Themes
Class and gratitude
Who paid for the self you wanted to become?
Guilt
Childhood complicity that adulthood keeps rewriting.
Motifs
A horizontal world of chains, mists, and origin.
Satis House as a museum of injury.