There are a number of themes in Charles DickensÆ Great Expectations. Perhaps one of the most significant is the fact that individuals often have great expectations that shape and inform their lives, expectations that are all too often much greater than realized. Pip is an excellent and the main example of this. Raised by his harsh older sister and her kindly blacksmith husband, PipÆs maltreatment by his sister is a sign of her own frustrated ôexpectationsö at her status in life. She is determined Pip shall become a gentlemen and rise in class, and raises Pip with ôa hard and heavy handö (Dickens 1960, 13). Class bias, hatred and revenge, love, and snobbery are other themes in the novel. Pip aids a stranger as a child, one who is later arrested but promises to repay Pip. Pip is sent to the home of Miss Havisham, an eccentric and bitter old woman, bitter over her jilting by a lover on their wedding day years earlier. Pip meets Estella, Miss HavershamÆs ward. Miss Haversham has raised Estella to be cold and harsh to all men, and so she is to Pip. Pip falls in love with her despite her treatment of him. When Jaggers summons Pip to London to become a gentleman, he assumes it is Miss Haversham trying to make him respectable for Estella. At this point Pip maintains ôgreat expectationsö of his future, one that he would like to think includes Estella. However, once he discovers Miss HavershamÆs manipulation to spoil his expectations he cannot forgive her, ôThat she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found in vengeance in, I knew full wellàI could look upon her without compassionö (Dickens 1960, 369).
PipÆs expectation turn out to be greater than his reality. He is shocked and disgusted when he finds out his benefactor is none other than the criminal he aided years before and that Este
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