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Great Expectations Social Class

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Recommended: Social class in the novel great expectations

Whether we like it or not, we all belong to a different social class, however this may change. This is especially true in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, a fictional book that compiles the many journeys that each characters goes through. This story is centered around Phillip Pirrup, the main and most important character. The writing primarily depicts the personal growth and development of the orphan. The setting of the book is in the marshes of Kent and London and is full of extreme imagery especially poverty; prison ships, and fights to the death. Not only that, but it is also filled of some colorful characters including the eccentric Miss Havisham, the cold, yet beautiful Estella, and the kind and generous blacksmith, Joe. There are many themes portrayed throughout …show more content…

These themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, as well as good and evil. Even though these themes do play a large role into the structure of the novel, the social class representation of Miss Havisham, Estella, and Pip play a crucial role into the deconstruction of the established ideas of Victorian social classism.
Miss Havisham is a character that is distinguished in one class, but, however, is somebody who has many different facets to her story. Miss Havisham is a mad, vengeful, dowager that lives in her rotting mansion, and wears the same disintegrating wedding dress every day. The event that made her to be at this stage of depression is that, on her wedding day, her soon-to-be husband, Compeyson, ran away moments before the wedding took place. Ever since then, she

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