Great Expectations

Great Expectations Review

Published serially in All the Year Round between 1860 and 1861, Great Expectations is widely considered Dickens’s greatest and most personally charged novel. He drew on his own childhood shame — his father’s imprisonment for debt, his months of labour in a blacking factory — to create Pip, a boy whose hunger for a better life becomes a trap of his own making.

The novel opens on the Kent marshes, where young Pip encounters an escaped convict named Magwitch. Years later, Pip is summoned to the decaying mansion of the jilted bride Miss Havisham, where he falls helplessly in love with her ward Estella — a girl raised, deliberately, to break men’s hearts. When a mysterious benefactor provides funds to make Pip a London gentleman, he abandons his brother-in-law Joe without a second thought.

What makes Great Expectations extraordinary is its unflinching honesty about its hero. Pip knows he is behaving badly. He is ashamed of Joe’s rough manners. He is ashamed of being ashamed. Dickens tracks the full psychology of social climbing — the intoxication, the self-betrayal, the erosion of genuine feeling — with a precision no subsequent novelist of class has surpassed.

The unmasking of Pip’s true benefactor is one of literature’s great reversals, forcing Pip and the reader to confront every assumption the novel has built. The lesson is not sentimental: goodness costs something, and Pip’s education in what it means arrives very late. Miss Havisham and Magwitch — a woman frozen by grief, a convict redeemed by gratitude — remain two of the most indelible figures in Victorian fiction.

The Secret That Binds the Novel Together

Dickens constructs Great Expectations as a vast, slowly tightening web of hidden connections, and the pleasure of the second half is watching the strands draw together. The benefactor Pip assumed was the wealthy Miss Havisham turns out to be Magwitch, the convict he fed on the marshes as a frightened child — meaning Pip’s gentility was funded not by the fairy-tale patron he imagined but by a hunted criminal’s gratitude. More devastating still is the revelation of Estella’s parentage: the cold, beautiful girl bred by Miss Havisham to torment men is in fact Magwitch’s own daughter. The architecture is almost preposterous in summary, yet Dickens makes it feel like fate, every coincidence a moral rhyme. The grand lesson lands quietly: the “low” convict and the “common” blacksmith are the novel’s true sources of love, while the genteel world Pip aspired to is hollow.

The Novel’s Real Gentlemen

Dickens fills the book with characters who quietly expose Pip’s snobbery for what it is. Joe Gargery, the illiterate blacksmith Pip comes to be ashamed of, is the moral centre of the whole novel — patient, loving, and incapable of meanness — and Pip’s slow journey back to valuing him is the story’s true arc. Biddy, the plain country girl who actually deserves him, embodies a goodness Pip is too dazzled to see. And Wemmick, the law-clerk who keeps a ruthless office self entirely separate from his tender private life in a tiny castle with his “Aged Parent,” is one of Dickens’s great comic-humane inventions, a man who has solved the problem of integrity in a corrupt world by literally compartmentalising it. Against these figures, the polished cruelty of Estella and the decayed grandeur of Miss Havisham stand condemned.

The Two Endings

No discussion of Great Expectations is complete without its famous textual controversy. Dickens originally wrote a bleak, quietly honest ending in which Pip and Estella meet briefly years later and part for good, each marked by suffering but separate. His friend, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, persuaded him that readers wanted hope, and Dickens rewrote the final page so that Pip takes Estella’s hand in the ruined garden and “saw no shadow of another parting from her.” The revised version is canonical, but many readers and critics prefer the original as truer to the novel’s clear-eyed theme of disillusionment. That Dickens could swing between the two so easily is itself revealing — and the ambiguity of even the revised ending means readers have argued about whether Pip and Estella truly end up together for over a century.

A Deeply Personal Masterpiece

More than any of his other novels, Great Expectations draws on the wound at the centre of Dickens’s own life: the childhood months he spent labouring in a blacking factory while his father sat in debtors’ prison, an experience of shame and abandonment he kept secret for years. That buried humiliation gives Pip’s snobbery and self-loathing their extraordinary authenticity — Dickens is not inventing the psychology of class shame, he is confessing it. The result is his most controlled and most modern novel: shorter and tighter than his sprawling earlier work, narrated in a first-person voice of remarkable honesty, and unflinching about its hero’s failures. Its only real weakness is a slackening of pace in the London middle section; everything else is close to perfect. It is no accident that the novel has never been out of print, has been adapted for screen and stage dozens of times, and remains a fixture of classrooms the world over: it is at once a gripping mystery, a tender comedy, a savage social critique, and a confession — the rare canonical classic that is also a genuine page-turner.

Our rating: 4.8/5 — A novel that grows in stature with every re-reading. Essential Dickens and essential Victorian fiction.

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