Charles Dickens published Great Expectations in 1861 and produced the most honest novel about class aspiration in English literature. Pip is a blacksmith's apprentice who is told, through the mechanism of an anonymous benefactor, that he has great expectations. Money is coming. A gentleman's life awaits. All he has to do is leave the forge, go to London, and become the person he was always meant to be. He goes. He becomes a gentleman. And the process of becoming a gentleman makes him a worse person than the blacksmith's apprentice ever was.

Dickens understood class mobility because he experienced it. He also understood that the desire to rise is not the same as the act of rising, and that the act of rising frequently requires abandoning the people who supported you when you were still at the bottom. Pip drops Joe. He drops Biddy. He spends money he does not have to maintain appearances he does not need. Dr. John O. Jordan of UC Santa Cruz, in his research on Dickens and social criticism, has argued that Great Expectations is Dickens's most unflinching examination of how class systems corrupt not by excluding people but by admitting them on terms that require self-betrayal.

The Convict Who Paid for Everything

The revelation that Pip's benefactor is not Miss Havisham but Abel Magwitch, the convict from the marshes, is the structural masterpiece of the novel. Pip's gentleman's education, his fine clothes, his London rooms, all of it was funded by a criminal's gratitude. Dickens forces Pip and the reader to confront the same question: does the source of the money change the value of the education? Pip thinks it does. He is horrified. And his horror reveals exactly what kind of gentleman he has become, the kind who cares more about the appearance of respectability than the reality of human connection.

The Forge He Should Never Have Left

Joe Gargery is the moral center of Great Expectations, a man who is everything Pip was taught to despise: common, uneducated, content with his station. But Joe is also generous, loyal, and incapable of the petty cruelties that Pip's new world requires. When Pip falls ill, Joe nurses him back to health without complaint or reproach. Dickens does not sentimentalize Joe. He simply places him next to the gentleman Pip has become and lets the comparison speak for itself.