Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The novel, Great Expectations, looks back upon a period of pre-Victorian development. It displays that ambition and self-improvement is something many aspire for but more often than not ambition can create problems for one and cause one to commit things that one never thought they would. Whereas, those who are not ambitious because they were born to a wealthy family do acts of malice knowing it but realizing that what they really wanted was indeed not what they wanted but were blinded by malice. It also displays that crime isn’t always committed out of malice but rather sometimes it is the only one can survive. However, one can seek to redeem themselves from it by seeking to help others. Mistakes are things one commits throughout life and experience. In the novel, Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, the characters Pip, Magwitch, and Miss Havisham demonstrated how society seeks redemption after committing mistakes that affected their life greatly.

Ambition and self-improvement is one of the major themes of the novel. The novel demonstrates how ambition and self-improvement can be blinding and causes one to make mistakes that will cause one later to want to redeem them. Philip “Pip” Pirrip was a character that yearned for ambition and self-improvement because the woman he had great feelings for him told him he was basically coarse and common and thus his “great expectations” for himself began and she was the light of his life. Later on, readers discover someone has “great expectations” of Pip and wishes to turn him into a gentleman, which is the convict whom he first encountered in the first chapter. When Pip first takes off for his journey of great expectations his attitude towards his “family” instantly changes towa...

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... She is an eccentric woman who was jilted at the alter and could not forgive nor forget the incident. She sought to hurt all men because of what had been done with her through her adopted daughter Estella, whom was the love of Pip. She lives in a rotting mansion and wears her wedding dress everyday of her life, and stopped the clocks twenty minutes until nine in remembrance of the time she was notified she was jilted. Miss Havisham makes the plot move forward because throughout the story Pip believes she is his benefactor and she plans to have Estella and him be together. Miss Havisham’s only intention towards bringing Pip to Satis House, her home, was to break his heart and make him feel how she used to feel. Her only concern was to break men’s heart through Estella. She made Pip and Estella suffer greatly not knowing that her actions were hurtful.