Great Expectations

Pip, an orphan raised by his sister and her husband Joe, helps an escaped convict on the marshes. He is summoned to Satis House by Miss Havisham, jilted on her wedding day, and falls in love with her ward Estella. An anonymous benefactor gives him expectations and he goes to London, where he grows ashamed of Joe. The benefactor proves to be the convict Magwitch, not Miss Havisham; Pip loses the money, nurses Magwitch, and is reconciled with Joe.

Published in 1861. Victorian society was more socially mobile than before but still rigidly conscious of rank, and the word gentleman meant both a level of birth and a standard of conduct. Convicts were transported to Australia, where some made fortunes that polite society did not want to acknowledge.

Pip narrates as an adult judging his younger self, so the novel criticises him without the reader having to. His shame is caught rather than chosen, which the Satis House scene makes explicit.

Miss Havisham is both victim and perpetrator, and the stopped clocks make her a person who has refused time. Estella warns Pip honestly and repeatedly, which complicates any reading of her as simply cruel.

Joe is the moral standard of the novel, and his non-standard grammar is used to convey integrity rather than ignorance. Magwitch is introduced as a Gothic threat and reassessed entirely, forcing the reader to repeat Pip's own change of mind.

Ambition and what a gentleman is are the novel's central question. Pip's social rise runs against his moral decline, and the novel reverses both.

Guilt attaches to Pip before he has done anything seriously wrong, which makes it feel like a condition rather than a consequence.

Class is shown as something learned: Pip is not born ashamed of his hands, he is taught to be.

Settings carry moral meaning: the open marshes, the forge, the sealed Satis House and a London that proves neither grand nor clean. Dickens uses recurring physical details, notably hands, as markers of class and labour, and the retrospective narration allows the older Pip's irony to sit over the younger Pip's experience.

This text is examined in Paper 1, Section B. The question is worth 30 marks and an extract from the novel is printed, and the question asks you to start with that extract and then write about the novel as a whole. Allow about 50 minutes.

The marks are divided as AO1 12 marks, AO2 12 marks, AO3 6 marks. AO1 rewards a clear argument supported by well-chosen references. AO2 rewards analysis of how the writer achieves an effect, which means writing about choices rather than about events. AO3 rewards context used to deepen a reading of the text.