How Dickens Used Characters to Comment on Social and Moral Values

The amazing piece of literature “Great Expectations” written from1860-61 by the legendary author Charles Dickens is a story about a young boy named Pip who throughout his life experience incidents that influence his “Great Expectations”. The title refers to Pip’s dreams and ambitions throughout the entire story. This affects Pip’s character as in the story we see how his ambitions cause him to change, for as a character he has immature, romantic idealism and an innately good conscience, with a deep-seated desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether social, educational or moral. When he meets a beautiful young girl that he falls in love with that treats him coldly because of his low status, he desires to become a gentleman. That then becomes the first of his “Great Expectations”. His desire for advancement and his love for the girl start clouding over his moral judgement, he then feels ashamed of his background, his desire for something better kicks in and then he tries to strive to become a gentleman, to be more intelligent and to improve his social values. His longing for the beautiful girl and to join the upper classes stems also from his desire as his longing to learn to read and write. Over the course of the story, he learns the hard way that one’s social status doesn’t guarantee one happiness. These desires and his efforts to achieve them are his “Great Expectations” which is the title of this book.

At the time of the spectacular literary work of the great Charles Dickens, Britain was living around the time of the Victorian era, from 1837-1901; times were very different from now. Class was a major thing in Victorian times and ones way of living depicted your moral values. For example, the upper class were the highest in the society and were known as” Aristocrats”, they lived lavish lifestyles and many of them had titles of knighthoods and baronetcies. Then in the bottom were the lower class known as the “deserving poor”. Many of them were unemployed and did criminal activity for a living. High social class were associated with romantic qualities such as luxury and education, so it was thought that because of that that they had greater moral value than those who were in the lower classes, the idea of the upper classes being the one with the best moral values was attractive to Pip. However, that was not the case. Over the course of this essay I will show you how the Victorians were wrong and you will learn the lesson that Pip learnt in the story, that the social class was an unjust, capricious standard that was largely incompatible with its own morals. When Pip learns what immorality, poverty and ignorance is, he doesn’t want to be poor, ignorant or immoral, he thinks that the lower your class the more immoral or ignorant or poor you will be so he then strives vigorously to become a “gentleman” and join the upper classes thinking it will be the end of his problems and that that is how he can be the best that he can morally. However, doing that meant that he distances himself with the people that love him most.

In the story, a lawyer named Jaggers comes to tell Pip that a secret benefactor has just given him a fortune, but the benefactor wishes to remain secret and that Pip should never know who his benefactor is. When Pip receives this fortune he is delighted, now he can be a gentleman, but his idealism and tendency to oversimplify situations based on superficial values leads him to treat the people closest to him badly, so when he becomes a gentleman he acts snobbishly to his closest friends as they are in a lower class from him and he believes that is how a gentleman should act.

The story starts off when Pip is seven years old, he is an orphan and so he walks into the graveyard by the church looking at his parent’s tombstones when suddenly an escaped convict appears and terrorizes him, being only seven Pip is afraid and begs for his life. The convict tells him he will spare Pip if he gets him a file for his leg irons and some food the next day “in the battery over yonder” he told him to do it and never say a word or sign that he had ever met the convict or else “your heart and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate”. Pip is absolutely frightened and when the convict leaves, runs home to his sister Mrs Joe Gargery and her husband Joe Gargery the local Blacksmith who Pip describes as “a fellow sufferer.” In chapter 2, he narrates; “ I always treated him as a larger piece of child”, meaning he has an excellent relationship with Joe and their bond is quite strong., His relationship with his sister is quite different and she had built up a reputation as bringing up Pip “by hand” and as Pip says in chapter 2 “having at that time to figure out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her too have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were brought up by hand”. Pip is very afraid of his sister because of her bad temper and in the same chapter when he reaches the house Joe tells him that his sister has been looking for him with “tickler”, which Pip describes as a “wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame”. When his sister came she was furious at for being to the churchyard and gave him a strict warning never to do it again. Then that night he stole food for the convict and the file. He gives it to the convict and is over-ridden with guilt, as a young boy he is very naive and even expects to see a policeman the next day coming to arrest him. The next day the convict gets caught but defends Pip by saying he stole the food himself. However, Pip still has the guilt from the deed in him. Then one day his Uncle Pumblechook visits to tell him that a very rich and elderly lady wants him to come to play at her house, he says the woman is called Miss Havisham. When Pip goes to her house he meets the beautiful young girl Estella who is looked after by Miss Havisham and treats him with contempt and coldness because of his “coarseness”. When we link this to moral values we see how the convict represents bad moral values. The convict’s position in the class system is the lowest of the low, he is forced to torment a young boy in order to get food, so perhaps the idea that the lower your system the worse your moral value is might be true, but then we look at Joe, who Pip has a strong relationship with and who is also of low class and we see the opposite of the convict, so Joe and the convict at this part of the story represent two different characters from the lower class system. Joe’s wife represents a controlling and oppressive character very unlike Joe. Pip represents a sweet, naïve, innocent character born of the lower class, so here we see very different characters from the same class system, not the general idea that all lower class were of less worth than those higher than them and that they had bad moral values.

The girl Estella as a character is an extremely ironic creation, and serves as one of the bitter criticisms of the upper class. Raised by Miss Havisham from the age of three to torment men and “break their hearts”, when Pip meets her she wins his love by practising deliberate cruelty. When he first encounters her as she is accompanying him to the house to see Miss Havisham, on the walk through the garden to the house she treats him very coldly and acts very proud, for while they were walking Pip and her get into a conversation about the house’s name Satis and Pip says “enough house” and she replies “Yes, but I meant more than I said. Satis meant that whoever had this house, could want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But don’t loiter boy”. The fact that she called him “boy” when it stated in chapter eight that she was the same age as him means that she is incredibly haughty and sees herself as much more important than Pip. Pip is the brother of a blacksmith’s wife so originally his social status isn’t very high and Estella judging him because of that sees herself as his superior. She uses the word “loiter” as if she’s commanding him not to slouch or walk around aimlessly just as a superior would talk to a servant. Another part of the story where she degrades and insults Pip is when she takes him to Miss Havisham, who after talking to him for a little while tells him to call her. When she comes in Miss Havisham tells the two of them to play cards, but she replies “with this boy! Why he is a common-labouring boy” to which Miss Havisham answers “well, you can break his heart”. Estella in this sentence shows the reason why she has behaved so coldly and haughtily to Pip is because of his status, she is so proud, that it is disgusting to her that she should play cards with someone of a low status like Pip. In Victorian times people of low status did labouring trades like farming and smithy which was going to be Pip’s trade. The fact that she calls him “common” shows that she thinks that he is simple and naïve as he is of lower class, and the fact that she calls him a “labouring boy” shows that she rates him as a poor, simple boy who is only good at simple poor men’s trade. When she plays cards with him she again degrades him because he called knave cards Jacks, and insulting him by calling his hands “coarse” and his boots thick. All of this is referring to Pip’s low status. After the game Miss Havisham tells him he can leave but to come back in three days, she allows him to explore the garden and then orders Estella to get him food. When she gives him his food she doesn’t even look at him. She was being so cruel that when she treated him like this that he states “I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry- I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart-God knows what it’s name was-tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them”.

This quote shows how Dickens is using Estella and Pip to comment on social and moral values. The accepted idea at that time was that the higher class had more moral value than the lower class. Estella is the representative of the upper class, while Pip is the representative from the lower class, surely if Estella was to have the greater moral value she would not have degraded him the way she did. Dickens gets us to feel sorry for Pip and puts a sense of antagonism on Estella so we dislike her for the way she is treating Pip. That is Dickens first step in proving that moral value isn’t restricted to class, as he makes it obvious that Pip has more moral value than Estella. The testaments to Estella “s cruelty is the way she treats him snobbishly at the beginning and then she then starts to become cruel. After seeing that she hurt him she is delighted face, and when Pip is about to leave she taunts him by saying “why don”t you cry?” to which Pip answers “because I don’t want to” to which she replies “you do, you have been crying till you are half blind, and you are near crying again now” then she laughs contemptuously and pushes him out of the gate. This is a testament to Estella’s wickedness, she isn’t the warm, kind-hearted, winsome heroine of a traditional love story. She is cold, cynical and manipulative, she finds humour in the fact that he is crying, and tries to make him cry even more by taunting him. This is evident that she is incredibly heartless for someone her age. She plays with Pip’s feelings acting on orders by Miss Havisham to “break his heart”. She acts snobbishly and cold, then one day she takes him to a corner and tells him to kiss her, then the next time he visits Miss Havisham she treats him just as before. Throughout the entire novel, she is Pip’s unattainable dream. He loves her passionately, but she is usually cold and uninterested in him, as they grow up together, she constantly reminds him that she has no heart. She is the reason that Pip strives to become a gentleman, so that he can be seen as having better social and moral value so that and to be worthy enough for her. Despite all this, the ironic truth is that in reality Estella is actually the daughter of the convict that threatened Pip in the graveyard, making her even lower-born than Pip, a fact that Pip learns toward the end of “Great Expectations”.

Life among the upper classes doesn’t present salvation for Estella. Raised by Miss Havisham, who manipulates Estella to use her beauty to “break men’s hearts” and destroys her ability to express emotion and interact normally with the world. Rather than marrying kind, gentle Pip, she marries a cruel brutish nobleman by the name of Drummule who treats her harshly and makes her life miserable for many years. Despite her cold behaviour and damaging influence over the years, Charles Dickens manages to make her into a sympathetic character. Dickens gives the reader a sense of her inner struggle to discover and act on her feelings and intentions instead of the motives that had been imposed on her by her upbringing. She does not seem to be able to stop herself from hurting Pip, but she also seems not to want to hurt him by repeatedly telling him that she has “no heart” and tries as strongly as she can to urge him find happiness by leaving her behind. Her long, painful marriage to the oafish Drummule causes her to learn along the same line as Pip, through experience to rely on your inner feelings instead of your status. In the final scene of the novel she manages to become her own woman for the first time in the book as she says to Pip “suffering has been stronger than all other teaching… I have been bent and broken, but- I hope- into a better shape”. Dickens uses Estella’s life to reinforce the idea that one’s happiness and well-being are not deeply connected to one’s social position: had she been poor, she might have been substantially better off. The belief that you have to be in the upper class to be the best moral value is idiotic, short-sighted and wrong, and Estella has suffered because of that belief but that suffering has made her wiser and made her realise her mistakes and because of the suffering she has become a better person, which is why she uses the quote “bent and broken, but into better shape”.Dickens shows us that during the entire course of the book using Estella.

There are many different types of characters in Great Expectations. For some bad characters there are good characters to match them. If Estella was cold-beauty, cynical and manipulative, then the character Biddy was her absolute opposite, plain, warm-hearted, kind and gentle and she is also of Pip’s social class. She is one of the few completely sympathetic characters in Great Expectations. She first befriends Pip when they attend school together. After Pip’s sister dies, she moves in to take care of Pip. When Pip becomes a gentleman he acts snobbishly towards her even though she seem to be the perfect woman for Pip to marry. She is warm, kind and gentle and one of his true friends from his social class he only uses her to become more educated so he can win over Estella. Later in the story when Pip finally decides to marry her, he discovers that he is too late and she has already married Joe.

Joe Gargery is Pip’s brother in-law and the village blacksmith, his quiet goodness makes him along with Biddy, one of the most sympathetic characters in Great Expectations. We know at the beginning of the story that Pip’s sister has a bad temper and is incredibly abusive and overbearing, nevertheless he stays with her because of his love for Pip. Pip describes his character in chapter 2 as “a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow-a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness”. From this quotation we can tell what a good character he is by the languages used “mild, good-natured, easy-going”, however, we also know and can tell by the rest of the quote that he is also very simple- a common blacksmith, yet although he is uneducated and unrefined, he consistently acts for the benefit of those he loves and when Pip becomes a gentleman and starts to act snobbishly to him and Biddy he takes it in silence. He is also very loyal and forgiving for near the end of the story when Pip falls ill he comes to London to take care of him, showing his great love for Pip and giving Pip the heart and will to live on.

After looking at the two purest characters in the story, we now have to look at one of the strangest, most foreboding character in Great Expectations, it is Miss Havisham. We know how Estella had used deliberate cruelty to get Pip to fall in love with her at the beginning, it was all Miss Havisham’s doing, she was the one who had raised the orphaned Estella and imposed those cruel motives on her. She is the reason why Estella is so cruel, cynical and manipulative, because of the way that she had raised her, to “break men’s hearts”. She is a wealthy, eccentric old woman who lives in the Satis house near Pip’s village. She is manic and often seems incredibly insane; she walks around her rotting mansion in a wedding dress and keeps a decayed feast on her table, and stops all the clocks in the house at twenty minutes to nine and wears only one shoe. There are some details about her life that a young man named Herbert Pocket states in chapter 22 “Miss Havisham you must know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father denied her nothing… Mr Havisham was very rich and very proud. So was his daughter…no she was not an only child; she had a half-brother. Her father privately married again-his cook, I rather think…. As the son grew into a young man, he turned out, riotous, undutiful-altogether bad. At last his father disinherited him… it is suspected that he cherished a deep mortal grudge against her for having influenced her father’s anger”. Her half-brother was to get his revenge in a brutal and heart-breaking way, his revenge was going to be the reason why Miss Havisham acts in the strange way that she does; she had fallen in love with a man called Compeyson, who she didn’t know was a gentleman criminal, they were meant to be married but he had stood her up on the altar because working together with Arthur Havisham, Miss Havisham’s brother, he had convinced her to sell her family’s brewery over to him on an enormous price, then he had split the shares with Arthur Havisham, then he jilted her on the altar and sent her a note at twenty to nine telling her this. From that moment on she was determined never to move beyond the heartbreak, that is the reason why she sets all her clocks to twenty minutes to nine, because that is when she received the note. She wears only one shoe, because at the time of the note she hadn’t put on the other shoe and also why she keeps the decayed food there, because that was the wedding feast, although it seems to be Compeyson, Miss Havisham is very much more a victim of her father than Compeyson. For it was through Arthur that Compeyson ever had anything to do with Miss Havisham, if her father had not disinherited him, he wouldn’t have had a grudge against her and Compeyson wouldn’t have been able to cheat her in such a way. This can all refer to the general issue of moral value, Miss Havisham and her half- brother are representatives of the upper class, what he did to her was incredibly cruel. The fact that he had held a grudge against her for what her father had done to him, the fact that he had grown up to be a bad and rebellious son despite growing up in the upper class shows that growing up in the upper class does not mean you will have great moral values. The fact that he had exacted his revenge in such a cruel and immoral way shows that despite being among the upper class his morals are very poor compared to people like Joe and Biddy. When his revenge takes it’s toll on Miss Havisham she adopts a hatred to the male race, adopting Estella, with a manic, obsessive cruelty, she manipulates her and destroys her ability to interact normally with the world so she can use her beauty to break men’s hearts and exact her revenge on men. Miss Havisham is completely unable to see that her actions hurt both Pip and Estella. She is redeemed at the the end of the story when she finally sees how she has caused Pip’s heart to be broken in the same manner as her own; rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain. Miss Havisham begs Pip for forgiveness, and it is granted to her. This reinforces one of the novel’s major themes that bad behaviour can be redeemed by contrition and sympathy.

Then we move on to a very important character in the story; Magwitch is an escaped criminal and the convict that threatened Pip when he was a little seven year old boy in the graveyard. Pip’s kindness however leaves a deep impression on him, so in Australia where he was sent he subsequently devotes himself into making a fortune so Pip can become a gentleman, so he is actually Pip’s benefactor, but Pip thought it was Miss Havisham as he had fantasized that Miss Havisham had given him the fortune so he could marry Estella. However Miss Havisham was just using Estella to break his heart for her own enjoyment. In the beginning before the novel started Magwitch had partnered with Compeyson, the gentleman criminal who had jilted Miss Havisham at the altar, Compeyson had betrayed him when they had been caught and used his gentlemanly manners to get a light sentence, Magwitch had escaped looking for Compeyson and had met Pip in the graveyard and threatened him to give him food and a file for his irons. When he had caught up with Compeyson the police found them, to protect Pip he said he had stolen the food himself, and he had been shipped to Australia where he had been so inspired and transformed but Pip’s goodness that he made a fortune for him cattle ranching and set up a man named Jaggers to be Pip’s lawyer. When Magwitch returns he is on the run from the law and takes refuge with Pip. Pip is horrified to realise that Magwitch is his secret benefactor because it means he was never meant for Estella, Pip also fears about what others will think as he would be associating with a criminal, someone of a much lower status than himself, he believed it would degrade his moral values. He also learns that Magwitch is Estella’s father and she stems from humbler origins than his own. He sees that Magwitch is now a changed man of great inner nobility, and Pip starts to love him once he sees that, to keep the story a secret from the servants and everyone else he calls Magwitch “Uncle Provis”. Magwitch is now on the run from Compeyson who had teamed up with the police and Pip needed to get him out of the country, so Pip arranged to take Magwitch in a boat downriver to a ship that would take Magwitch to another country, however, they look across and see the police steamer with Compeyson, Magwitch jumps into the water to fight Compeyson, the two grappled and went underwater and only Magwitch came up, he said that Compeyson had drowned but it wasn’t his fault, he is then caught, Pip visits him in prison and then he is sentenced to death, telling the judge that his death means that God had forgiven him for his sins. This part of the story teaches us a great deal, we know that Magwitch is a criminal of low status at the beginning of the story and he was an argument for people who that those in the lower class had less moral values, but he turned his life around and became a good example, worn back Pip’s love and despite all that happened died peacefully. If salvation happened to a low class criminal like Magwitch than surely moral values aren’t imbued to just the high and mighty.

To summarise this essay, we need to look at the essay question, how did Dickens use characters to comment on social and moral values?.Well we need to look at the characters, in Victorian times it was thought that one’s social class depicted one’s moral values, well if that was true that would be saying that all the upper class people are worth more than the lower class, but is Estella really more valuable than Biddy? Is her oafish noble husband who mistreats her, Drummule, really more valuable than Joe?. or is Miss Havisham really more valuable than Magwitch?. Surely not. Estella has been brought up not being able to interact with the world, used to break men’s hearts and is brought up to be cold, manipulative and cynical, using the utmost cruelty to break men’s hearts. She marries an arrogant nobleman who treats her badly for eleven years, and her life has being in the upper class benefited her nothing, as for all her haughtiness she ended up marrying a man who abused her and ended up lonely and unhappy, she would have been better off being poor and being brought up by Magwitch. We look at Miss Havisham, who was drenched in bitterness at men and had raised a girl to break men’s hearts, including Pip’s. She was an incredibly wealthy woman with a high status, yet she was raising a child to break men’s hearts. That is hardly moral, surely if the upper class were as moral as that they would have moved on, but she didn’t, she tried to get even with men and ended up hurting herself and other people more, she had begged for forgiveness and Pip being as kind as he is forgave her, but doesn’t that teach us a lesson. The convict as well was a frightening criminal but he had gotten himself on the right track through Pip and had gone and made money selflessly for the sake of Pip and worn Pip’s love, the similarity between these two characters the convict and Miss Havisham was that they both died redeemed and forgiven. If we then take the example of Pip who, because of Estella strives to become a gentleman, when he receives the fortune he chases after Estella but she is uninterested in him, he loses Joe, which is a terrible loss to him, he loses Biddy to chase after Estella, he thinks that Miss Havisham gave him the fortune so that he could marry Estella, but that dream is shattered when Magwitch tells him the truth. He fails to get Magwitch out of the country who is then sentenced to death. He seems to have failed all his “Great Expectations”. He had expected that becoming a gentleman was going to raise his moral values; this little “expectation” fails. He hopes then “expects” that becoming a gentleman will win Estella’s heart- this other little “expectation” fails, he thinks that Miss Havisham gave him the fortune and that means that he will marry Estella, this “expectation” fails again. He had expected that he would be able to get Magwitch out of the country and save him; even this “expectation” fails. When he goes back to the village to marry Biddy, he discovers that she has married Joe that is the last “great expectation” failed, it seems to the reader that all of Pip’s “Great Expectations” failed, why is that?

It is because of the lesson that Charles Dickens was trying to teach us, he had first-hand experience of how poorly working-class became major themes of his work. When he was young he had worked in a warehouse and the terrible working conditions he experienced made a deep impression on him, it became the theme of his novels like Oliver Twist, he was also a social reformist who disliked the view that class depicted your moral values so wrote “Great Expectations” to criticise it. In the story the only two characters that have a truly happy ending are Joe and Biddy, they are the two of the most sympathetic characters in the play, they are low class, yet it is plainly obvious that they are the ones with the best morals and are the perfect couple for each other, together they are kind, warm-hearted and sympathetic. What Dickens is showing by failing Pip’s expectations is that Pip didn’t need to be a gentleman or have a high status or leave his friends behind, the most important lesson that Pip learns and perhaps the most important theme in “Great Expectations is that no external value can replace the value of one’s own conscience. Characters like Joe and Biddy know that instinctively but for Pip and Estella it’s just one long, hard lesson. Dickens used very different styles of characters to structure the novel’s themes, Estella, cold, high-class, manipulative and beautiful with Biddy poor, plain and warm- hearted, in the end Biddy had a very happy ending marrying Joe while Estella suffered many years of her life. Biddy and Joe represents kindness and excellent morality in a low class status. Miss Havisham and Estella represented bad moral values in an upper class system; Magwitch represents a low-class criminal that changed because of the kindness of a young boy and found his inner nobility, while Pip represents a lesson to us all. The theme of the novel he was teaching of, that moral value has nothing to do with social class and that anyone can have great moral value.