This experience greatly influenced his future writing.

When Charles Dickens was 12 years old, his father spent three months in debtors prison.Criminality and prison shadow Pip’s life, beginning with his boyhood home near the prison ships and through to the origins of his great expectations.Pip’s penitence and his family’s forgiveness enable Pip’s redemption. Conversely, Compeyson’s lack of remorse and Miss Havisham’s inability to forgive him keep Satis House frozen in time and darkness.The novel contains many elements of social satire and caricature, but ultimately, the tale is a redemptive one.But it’s only when Pip loses everything that he understands what’s truly noble: honesty, humility, hard work, selflessness and a pure heart. A mysterious benefactor transforms poor, country boy Pip into a high-society, London gentleman.Great Expectations is a coming-of-age tale with strong moral lessons about wealth and nobility, guilt and criminality, and conscience and self-deception.Despite its social satire, Great Expectations is, like most of Dickens’s oeuvre, ultimately a story of redemption – a feel-good tale apt to bolster your faith in humanity. Pip’s very love for Estella drives his doomed pursuit of gentility and wealth. Its author, Charles Dickens, characteristically paces his narrative with plentiful mysteries and twists, including the true identity of Pip’s generous benefactor – the creator of Pip’s “great expectations.” The novel is simultaneously a bleak love story that pits the hero’s warmth and devotion against his love interest’s cynicism and cruelty. Throughout, various shadowy intrigues, a classic madwoman-in-the-attic, sinister plots and even a chase on the River Thames enliven the story.

Great expectations by charles dickens