What social class did charles dickens write about in Great Expectations?
He wrote about the working class and the middle class. More accurately, he was raising the question of which has moral superiority. Dickens was attacking the assumption that money and manners make someone better. Pip, embarrassed at his humble origins, is impressed by the wealth of Miss Havisham. He meets Estella and wants to become a gentleman to impress her. This leads him to a life of snobbery – ashamed of his step-brother’s (Joe Gargery) ways when Joe visits Pip in London. But when he comes to realise how wrong he has been about people (in particular Miss Havisham) he realises that wealth is a poor way of judging someone’s gentility. In the end he describes Joe as a ‘gentle Christian man’, suggesting that one’s morality and how we deal with others is a better definition of class and being a gentleman. More sophisticated than that, the story is an exploration of one’s origins and being. It was written just a year after Darwin’s ‘Origins of Species’ was published. ‘Great Expectations
