Great Expectations Summary and PDF | Society of Classical Poets (2024)

The summary and introduction below is from a newly adapted (UK spellings Americanized and punctuation updated), illustrated, and annotated version of Great Expectations in PDF made free for download for teachers, students, and interested readers by the Society of Classical Poets. It can be purchased in book form on Amazon here. If you download, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets here. Enjoy an interpretation of “Old Clem” from the story here.

Download a PDF of full text of the book here.

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Introduction

The term “great expectations” is no longer in use. Today, people might say that someone “comes from money,” “is loaded,” “is from a rich family,” or “is a trust fund baby.” It means that this young person can expect to not worry too much about money in the coming years and can enjoy a relatively high standard of living. It is a positive circumstance that almost any young person would like to find themselves in. In his novel, author Charles Dickens (1812-1870) takes great expectations and turns the concept itself into a soul-searching and sometimes deadly adventure.

Specifically, Great Expectations is often considered one of the prime examples of a bildüngsroman, or coming-of-age novel. It traces the life of the main character and narrator, Pip, from some of his earliest memories into his early twenties and beyond as he navigates through such universal waters as careers, life paths, education, and love interests. So, yes, Great Expectations is a bildüngroman. But, it is also more.
The story, published in 1861, was written by Dickens while he lived in England during the Industrial Revolution. He used his experiences of London and England and the spirit of his era as the backdrop for Great Expectations. For instance, Dickens has Pip arrive in London at the same place that his family arrived; like Pip, they also sought better prospects in life. Dickens’ father ended up in debtors’ prison, where people who didn’t pay their debts were held (debtors’ prisons no longer exist today), and, in order to support his family, little 12-year-old Charles Dickens had to go to work in a blacking factory in London, where products were dyed black. After his father returned, Dickens went back to school until age 15. In the following years, Dickens went on to have a number of writing jobs, including as a law clerk and newspaper reporter. At the young age of 24, Dickens became a highly successful writer. He went on to produce such acclaimed works as A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, and Oliver Twist. Dickens’ real story was indeed an adventure.

Connections between his real life and his fiction have often led to interpretations that say Dickens’ stories are about social reform and the Industrial Revolution. I will not pass judgment on those claims, but I will say that there is an unmistakable history and realism to his works. If you are visiting London, Great Expectations would without a doubt be an excellent book to read between your travels. So, yes, Great Expectations can be read as an intriguing work of historical fiction. But, it is also more.

I’ve had the unique experience of reading Great Expectations at three very different phases of my life. Once at the beginning of my high school education, once near the end of my college education, and again, many times, as a middle-aged teacher. It is only now that I feel the full scope of the genius of Dickens has been laid out before me and I will endeavor to sum it up for those students and others who may pass through the lines of Great Expectations without seeing its more monumental contours. And for those who disagree, this is at least something to chew on and, if you like, spit out.

At the heart of Great Expectations is a conflict between two major forces: the traditional world, most clearly represented by the character Joe Gargery, who is an uneducated blacksmith, and the modernizing world, most clearly represented by the character Mr. Jaggers, an energetic and no-nonsense lawyer. (The character Wemmick sits quite amusingly and sometimes awkwardly right in the middle.) This was difficult for me to grasp for so long because I did not have a clear notion of what the traditional world really entailed and how that differed from the already modernized world we have all grown up in.

The traditional world operated on the pyramidal system with the monarch—a king, queen, emperor, or empress—at the top. Then there was an aristocracy (dukes, duchesses, barons, baronesses, knights, dames, lords, ladies, nobles, etc.), as well as bishops and archbishops (in a parallel track I won’t get into here). Below them were the other land owners, scholars, priests, lawyers, doctors, and wealthy merchants, and then the commoners, peasants, serfs, slaves, and others below. The higher up, the more powerful the position. This is an oversimplification but it gives the general idea.

On the other hand, our system today may be thought of as a big rectangle with the lower class at the bottom, the large middle class on top of that, and the smaller high class at the very top. In the modern system, it is very simple: how much money you have determines your position and power. That’s all there is. This simplicity creates mobility lacking in the traditional system, at least in theory. A poor person who wins the lottery can move from the lower class to the upper class instantly (although, whether he can hold on to his new wealth is another question).

In the traditional system, your lineage matters more than your money. But, there is something even more important than who your father or mother was—and this is the part that you generally do not learn about today—and that is morality. (An over emphasis on the less important aspect of the traditional system, the lineage, is seen humorously portrayed in the character Mrs. Pocket.) While the modern system simply ends with the upper class, the traditional system has the Creator, Heaven, saints, and, depending on your faith, angels and various righteous and enlightened beings on higher planes of existence. These are all above the traditional social pyramid.

Each successive layer up the pyramid approaches closer to the divine realm and, accordingly, is supposed to have a higher and higher degree of morality. Your responsibilities increase and the number of people who depend on you increases. The King must worry about not only keeping his own particular home safe, but also about keeping everyone’s homes and the entire kingdom safe. He must not only worry about his own family, but also about every family in the land. It goes without saying that he cannot casually fall too deeply into vices; instead, he must worry about what will happen if too many of his subjects fall deeply into vices.

These same relationships apply in diminishing degrees to the aristocracy and the levels below them. Even the villains and those of a low class have to operate within this system and atheism is thus simply outside of the system, or leads to almost immediate death. This is the ideal traditional system at work. Of course, there are immoral kings and aristocrats, but they are the minority and are headed for a fall sooner rather than later, and—in the traditional paradigm—all accounts are settled in the afterlife, if not this life.

This emphasis on morality is seen in Joe’s reprimanding Pip after Pip tells an elaborate lie. Joe says, “lies is lies. Howsoever they come, they didn’t ought to come, and they come from the father of lies [Satan], and work round to the same. Don’t you tell no more of ’em, Pip. That ain’t the way to get out of being common, old chap.” Joe is meant to be at or near the bottom of the traditional class system as a “common” blacksmith, and he reveals that morality is a fundamental all-encompassing factor in how the traditional system works and how it is that those higher up in the pyramid are able to be where they are.

Jaggers, meanwhile, wields the full powers of the modernizing world and has what seems to be the highest regard for money. In one of his earliest scenes, he tellingly states, “Understand that I express no opinion, one way or other, on the trust I undertake. I am paid for undertaking it and I do so. Now, understand that, finally. Understand that!” Meanwhile, Jaggers seems to have much less interest in morality, and often defends people he knows are guilty without any apparent qualm.

There is much more in the text for you yourself to discover in reading Great Expectations along the broad lines of this theme, which perhaps could be summarized as the traditional world versus the modernizing world. I will leave you with just one more subtle way that Dickens hinted at this theme. Joe Gargery of course bears a traditional name, the name of Saint Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father. Meanwhile, Jaggers never has a first name in the novel, nor a family to call him by it. He only has a non-Biblical name that alludes merely to managing horses.

Finally, one motif that is often overlooked in Great Expectation is supernormal and psychic phenomena. From realistic treatments of ghosts, to detailed descriptions of premonitions of future events, to extremely lucid thoughts in moments of panic, Dickens laid a rich groundwork for this theme.

Dickens was never a follower of Charles Darwin, his fellow Englishman whose theory of evolution had been publicized in the Origin of Species in 1859, just two years before Great Expectations was published. And perhaps it goes without saying that Dickens was never a follower of Karl Marx, whose anti-traditional Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. Dickens’ rejection of these emerging ideologies is reflected in his work’s thematic rejection of materialistic scientific reasoning, which has turned the theory of evolution into unquestionable dogma today. Throughout the novel, it is revealed how Dickens clearly believed in spiritual forms of existence that were difficult to observe but objectively existed and had power over our world. His depictions of these phenomena have drawn readers back to Great Expectationsgeneration after generation because they are essentially real and true.

Ultimately, this motif too reinforces the ideas of the traditional world and puts it at odds with the evidence-based extremism of the modernizing world. Mr. Jaggers illustrates this extremism with the lines, “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.” But, Mr. Jaggers, Dickens seems to ask, isn’t there obviously more to life than what can be proven with tangible, reproducible evidence? Or as William Shakespeare wrote through the mouth of Prince Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, [Jaggers], than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

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This introduction is from a new edition of Great Expectations annotated, illustrated, and adapted for students and Dickens’ fans alike. Purchase it here.

Evan Mantyk is an English and history teacher and President & Editor of the Society of Classical Poets (classicalpoets.org).

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