Great Expectations are often spoken of as a Bildungsroman, the novel of education. What kinds of education do the young characters receive in the novel?
What do Miss Havisham and Magwitch have in common?
What symbolic meaning could the name of Estella carry?
What Gothic elements are present in the novel?
What role does social class play in the novel?
The system of justice is present in the novel from the beginning, symbolized by the shadow of the gibbet. How is it portrayed?
What action does Jaggers perform obsessively and what symbolic meaning does it carry?
People living double lives were a popular motif of the Victorian novel (viz. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray). How is this theme used in Great Expectations and what social issue does it illustrate?
Dickens hardly every portrayed good parents in his novels. What models of parenting are presented in Great Expectations?
The plot of the novel, which relies heavily on coincidences, can be accused of being melodramatic. What purpose do the coincidences serve? (for instance, Compeyson being the cause of ruin of both Miss Havisham and Magwitch)
Dickens plays with the fairy-tale motifs (e.g. calling Miss Havisham “my fairy godmother”). How does he employ them or undermine them?
How do you interpret the title of the novel in the context of the whole story?
The novel originally ended with the scene of Pip and Estella parting*, but Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a writer and a friend of Dickens, persuaded him not to end on such a downer note. Which ending do you find more convincing and more true to the thematic development of the story?
How do you interpret the line "I saw no shadow of another parting from her"?
* `In the original ending, which is included as an appendix in many editions of the novel, Pip returns to England after eight years in Egypt and while he is walking with little Pip, Joe and
Biddy's child, on a street in London, he meets Estella, who has married a Shropshire doctor after her unhappy marriage to Drummle. She assumes that the child is Pip's and he does not tell her otherwise; then she confides that suffering has changed her. Pip concludes the original ending by remarking: "I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be."' (Paul Davis, Charles Dickesn A to Z)
** Since a surprising number of students interpret “raising by hand” like Pip, literally, I include the following excerpt from Sally Mitchell's Daily Life in Victorian England, explaining why Pip's survival is perceived as such a feat.
Although sending a baby out to nurse with a country woman was still common in some parts of Europe, wetnurses had seldom been used in England except by people of extremely high social position. It was not uncommon, however, for mothers to die in childbirth or get infections that prevented nursing. Cow's milk was apt to be contaminated and needed diluting so babies could digest it; the water was even more likely to be dangerous. For centuries, milk had been put into an animal horn or a stoneware bottle with a rag stuffed in the end so the infant could suck. This, we now realize, made an ideal environment for germs; no wonder that in some foundling homes 90 percent of the newborns died. Glass bottles and rubber nipples became available in the middle of the century; and the importance of sterilizing the milk, water, and bottle was understood in the 1890s.