Great expectations tell the story of Pip, an orphan boy educated by his sister and destined for a dark existence. One day he meets the strange Miss Havisham, who lives at home in the company of his adopted daughter, Estella, whose cold and perfect beauty unsettles the boy from the day he meets her. Afterward, Pip will receive a good education and hopes to inherit an immense fortune from a mysterious benefactor. Because of this fact, his life will change: he will go to London, he will dare to conquer the inaccessible Estella, he will forget his friends and he will renege on the modest environment from which he left. Things will not happen as he anticipated, but he will end up learning the best lesson: to be a serious and good man.
Dickens knew how to reflect his life with the precision in this novel. Charles Dickens was born in 1812, in Portsmouth, England, into a modest family. He did not receive academic training until he was 9 years old. When Dickens was 11 years old he went with his family to live in Camden Town (London), then a poor neighborhood. It was then that his father entered prison, and most of the family moved to live with him in jail. The future writer was welcomed by another family a little more money than they, however, at age 12 his mother forced him to work in a bitumen factory. We hac see how many of his life is shown in the story of Pip in Great Expectations.
Even when he was already rich, he went out to walk the streets of London through the least recommended neighborhoods to get to know reality first-hand. The hardships of his childhood and his adherence to radicalism were modeling in him a spirit of protest for the injustice of a political and social system that benefited the powerful. The protest is directly exercised by his characters, who live in a misery that has nothing imaginary. The denunciation of the unequal society is done with a style that moves between sentimentality and tenderness, not in the manner of a revolutionary, but worried about human suffering.
We note that many aspects of the writer's real life are reflected in the novel through his characters, also, part of his learning is transmitted in the message of the book. Forget about your friends and other important things when you have money. Instead, the writer continued going to poor neighborhoods to better understand the lives of people and social inequality.