Social class in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Of all Charles Dickens’s treatments of social class in his novels, that presented in “Great Expectations” is the most radical and thorough. Indeed, many commentators have seen this book as the supreme exploration of the topic in Victorian literature.

Social class, and the allied topics of social upheaval and mobility, reached its peak as a matter of artistic concern in the Victorian era. The Industrial Revolution had created a vast new underclass of urban factory workers and another new class of “nouveau riche” social climbers who owned the factories and profited from the labours of their employees. These social distinctions ran in parallel with the old social class system of landed gentry and rural poor, which in turn derived from the medieval feudal system.

Dickens himself was something of a social climber. He was personally ashamed of certain aspects of his past, such as his time as a child worker in a blacking factory, and had always dreamed of bettering himself. In 1856 he had bought a country house in Kent (Gad’s Hill) which he had seen many times in his childhood when taken on walks by his father, and he had often fantasised about living in it one day. His writing of “Great Expectations” (1860-1) coincided with his taking up permanent residence at Gad’s Hill, thus realising a “great expectation” of his own.

“Great Expectations” was written the year after Samuel Smiles published his highly influential “Self-Help”, which encouraged people from the lower middle class to practice thrift and self-improvement and thus give themselves a social boost. The monthly parts of Dickens’s new novel would therefore have been read by many people who had expectations of their own, great or otherwise.

The central character of “Great Expectations” is Pip (his own childhood attempt to pronounce his name, Philip Pirrip). He lives with his elder sister who is married to a village blacksmith, to whom Pip becomes apprenticed. These are honest, hard-working people with no social aspirations of their own and who do not deserve the misfortunes that befall them later in the novel.

Pip’s first encounter with people from a higher social class is when he is invited to visit an eccentric old lady, Miss Havisham, who lives in the grand Satis House, which she keeps in exactly the same state as it was on the day she was jilted at the altar many years before. Living with her is her ward, Estelle, whom Miss Havisham is bringing up to despise all men. It soon becomes clear that Pip’s function is to be enchanted by Estelle (which he is) and then rejected. Our view of the upper class, as seen through these women, is therefore a highly prejudiced one, as it comprises people for whom the lower class are there to be used as tools for their own ends.

However, Pip is then told that he has “great expectations” of his own, thanks to an unknown benefactor, whom he naturally believes to be Miss Havisham. In this he is wrong, because the sudden promotion in wealth and class status comes to him courtesy of a convict, Magwitch, whom Pip had helped as a child and who has made his fortune in Australia, to which he had been transported.

By giving Pip the chance to raise his social status, albeit anonymously, Magwitch seeks to do, through Pip, what he could never do for himself, namely become a gentleman. However, gentility is not so easy to acquire simply through the gaining of wealth, and this is the central message of the book. Pip’s response to his change of status is to think himself better than those people on whom he has depended for his whole life to date, and he becomes a snob who is lucky to hold on to the few true friends he has.

Magwitch, who has escaped from his sentence and returned to England to find Pip, gets a very different reception from the one he had expected. Far from being welcomed with open arms by the gentleman he has created, he finds that Pip’s overriding concern is that Magwitch should leave as soon as possible. Neither Pip not Magwitch have understood what being a gentleman entails.

What we have in “Great Expectations”, therefore, is a set of “dos and don’ts” relating to the class system. Dickens was a man of his time in that he believed that social distinctions mattered. He did not take the line of his contemporary (and fellow Londoner) Karl Marx, who wished to give political power to the underclass. Instead, Dickens pointed to the morality of what was right and wrong in terms of social expectations.

For one thing, the behaviour of Miss Havisham and Estelle is unacceptable, and Estelle is brought to realise this. Being socially superior does not give one the right to play games with the feelings and emotions of those less fortunate.

On the other hand, social class is not something that can be bought and sold, which is the mistake made by Magwitch. In the last analysis, morality is more important than class. Pip’s aspirations are noble, in that education, social refinement and material advancement are desirable goals, in the “Self-Help” tradition, but he goes about achieving these things in the wrong way. Ultimately, it is the people in one’s life who matter, whatever their social class, and it is always wrong to forget those people when one’s own aspirations are met.

In “Great Expectations”, by showing that Pip’s expectations are founded on self-deception, Dickens was able to present an incisive assessment of the Victorian achievement. No novel of the Victorian era, by any writer who tackled the question of social class, did a better job of portraying the subtle interplay of class, character and morality than “Great Expectations”.

© John Welford