This essay examines the theme of crime and punishment in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, arguing that Dickens uses criminality and its consequences to expose the deep inequities of the Victorian criminal justice system. Through close analysis of characters including Pip, Magwitch, Estella, Molly, and the lawyer Jaggers, the paper demonstrates how wealth and class determine perceptions of guilt, the degree of punishment inflicted, and the opportunity for social advancement. Drawing on scholarship by Morgentaler, Moynahan, Hagan, and Collins, the essay traces how crime ironically enables Pip's rise while simultaneously threatening his ruin, and concludes that Dickens' social commentary on justice and class remains strikingly relevant to modern criminal justice systems.
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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is epic in scope, covering the rise and fall of its hero Pip through the class system of nineteenth-century England, with the growth and failure of a tragic romance woven throughout. The several interconnected plot lines, the wide cast of detailed and fully human characters, and the many timeless and universal themes that play integral roles throughout the story all mark this novel as one of the masterpieces of English literature. Its social commentary is important both historically and as an ongoing dialogue with modern society. One theme in particular continues to reverberate in a modern context: the novel deals with crime and punishment in ways both fundamental to the plot and incidental, and the perspective it offers on the relationship between justice and wealth — and more specifically, between justice and class — is quite cutting indeed.
Through an examination of the many instances in Great Expectations where the theme of crime and punishment appears, it becomes clear that Dickens disapproves of the criminal justice system as he witnessed it being carried out, and that many of the same issues he observed remain problems today. Perceptions of class and manipulations of appearance are shown to be more important than actual facts in many cases, affecting both the establishment of guilt and the degree of punishment inflicted. At the same time, crime provides the very means by which Pip's education and rise out of his class is facilitated. Crime is the way up, and the way up is the way out of crime — or at least out of punishment — in a complex, ironic, and often cynical yet entirely honest and poignant portrayal of how social systems shape personal lives. From Pip's role in Magwitch's escape to his visits to Newgate Prison, crime, criminals, and their punishments form an incredibly important part of both Pip's development and the narrative the reader experiences. Dickens' ultimate message is that crime does not diminish one's humanity, nor should punishment degrade it, and that a recognition of humanity outside of class is necessary for a recognition of humanity that extends beyond criminality.
The plot of Great Expectations depends upon criminality — specifically upon Pip's complicity in helping a criminal, Magwitch, to escape. It is Magwitch, made rich not through his crimes but through a twist of circumstances resulting from his punishment, who becomes Pip's anonymous benefactor and gives him the opportunity to move beyond the blacksmith's forge and into, for a time, the upper-middle class of English society. Pip's trajectory through the novel is thus directly tied to issues of crime and punishment. The great irony is that the very lack of humanity in the criminal justice system that Dickens so clearly decries is also responsible for elevating Pip to a position of recognized humanity. Even as Dickens and Pip both recognize the injustice inherent to the treatment of crime and punishment, both benefit indirectly from criminality and from the very injustices of the system.
Critic Goldie Morgentaler sees a strong strain of Darwinian struggle in Great Expectations, a reading strengthened by the temporal proximity of the novel's composition to the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species. Noting the phrase "universal struggle" in the second paragraph of Dickens' novel — a phrase that first appeared with similar meaning in the third chapter of Darwin's work — Morgentaler reads Pip's journey and much of the novel's commentary as evidence of a kind of social Darwinism at work, with only those best suited to the rules, values, and constraints of society able to achieve any measure of success within it (p. 707). Magwitch's criminality sets him on the road to fortune, but simple wealth is not enough to make Magwitch a gentleman or to grant him acceptance as a successful member of society; he is already an adult, already "evolved," and his traits are set against him. Pip, despite his lowly birth and his circumstances as a parentless apprentice to his brother-in-law and father figure — the blacksmith Joe Gargery — is still malleable. The fruits of Magwitch's crime are therefore able to propel Pip to greater heights as he adapts to the demands of society. While Magwitch is punished for his crime far beyond what is justly deserved, because his language and manner are too low-class to allow him to make use of his wealth, Pip is rewarded for his assistance in Magwitch's criminality with the very traits society requires.
At the same time, all of Pip's education and refinement ends up as a punishment in its own right. Magwitch does not have the wealth to sustain Pip in any gentlemanly fashion: Pip becomes unable to remain in the class to which he was born, given the broader views and higher vistas his education has granted him, yet he is equally unable to remain in the class to which he has grown accustomed, due to a lack of money. By the time Pip learns the identity of his mysterious benefactor, he is in danger of becoming a "criminal" himself due to his mounting debts — the non-payment of which was a crime that could carry a prison sentence during Dickens' era. Pip's story directly illuminates the "social evils" of the criminal justice system as it existed during Dickens' day, with his social rise facilitated indirectly through criminal funding and with his lack of funding as an erstwhile member of the upper-middle class tantamount to criminality (Hagan, p. 169). Crime pays, and not being able to pay is a crime. Dickens' society is one in which money truly defines not only class but the capacity for culpability, with the moneyed classes almost entirely above the law and the lower classes in constant fear of it.
"Estella's criminal origins contrast with her elevated status"
"Newgate symbolizes how crime enriches the powerful classes"
Morgentaler, Goldie. "Meditating on the Low: A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations." Studies in English Literature 38(4) (1998), pp. 707–21.
Moynahan, Julian. "The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations." Essays in Criticism 10(1) (1960), pp. 60–79.
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