Victorian Bildungsroman In Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Great expectations, is a Victorian Bildungsroman centred of the self development of a protagonist named Pip. Pip’s great expectations are accompanied by him acquiring new character traits such as selfishness, snobbery and dandyism. His expectation conditions his once innocent and morally just character. Destroys his relationship with his loved ones and ultimately leaves him a wanderer, with no place to call home.

Pip loses his childlike innocence after meeting the snobby Estella and the selfish Miss Havisham, who uses Estella to carry out her vengeance. Pip learns to use people in order to realise his great expectations to become an educated gentleman, in hope to marry Estella. Pip adopts a character trait knows as selfishness, when an individual is selfish he is said to be “someone who only thinks of their own advantages” (Cambrigde 1295).The first person to fall victim to his selfishness is Biddy. Pip uses Biddy “towards making himself uncommon” by “getting out of Biddy everything she knew” (Dickens 107). Ironically Pip goes to a person as common as he in an attempt to become less common just to fit in with the like of Miss Havisham and Estella. Pip uses Biddy to educate him with the hope of impressing Estella. Not only Biddy is subjected to this selfishness but Joe as well. Pip uses the education he gains from Biddy to educate Joe, in order “to impart to Joe” whatever he learnt as an attempt to make him “less ignorant and common. So that he might be worthier of [his]