Great Expectations

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Dickens' early childhood are mirrored in , which, apart from David Copperfield, is his most autobiographical novel. Pip, the novel's protagonist, lives in the marsh country, works at a job he hates, considers himself too good for his surroundings, and experiences material success in London at a very early age. In addition, one of the novel's most appealing characters is a law clerk named Wemmick, and the law, justice, and the courts are all important components of the story.
is set in early Victorian England, a time when great social changes were sweeping the nation. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the social landscape, enabling capitalists and manufacturers to amass huge fortunes. Although social class was no longer entirely dependent on heredity, the divisions between rich and poor remained nearly as wide as ever. London, a teeming mass of humanity, lit by gas lamps at night and darkened by black clouds from smokestacks during the day, had become radically different from ...

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socially.
Jaggers' clerk and Pip's friend, Wemmick is one of the strangest characters in all of Great Expectations. At work, he is hard, cynical, sarcastic, and obsessed with "portable property"; at home in Walworth, he is jovial, wry, and a tender caretaker of his "Aged Parent."
Estella - Miss Havisham's beautiful young ward, Estella is Pip's unattainable dream throughout the novel. He loves her passionately, but though she sometimes seems to consider him a friend, she is usually cold, cruel, and disinterested in him. As they grow up together, she repeatedly warns him that she has no heart. Though she does not know it herself--and though Pip does not learn it until almost the end of ...

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