and Satis House, the more he realizes how lacking in opportunity his life is. He is conflicted over his desire for advancement and his love for the family that is preventing that advancement.

The second external conflict is with Pip’s family. Pip learns that he has a mysterious benefactor and that the benefactor intends to make him a gentleman. Pip does not know what a gentleman is or how to become one and as he struggles to figure this out, he becomes a snob. Pip is excited about his future, but he is torn between his “great expectations” and his loving, though embarrassing, family. He does not really know how a gentlemen is supposed to act, but when he makes a stab at it, he becomes conceited and obnoxious. He looks down on Joe and Biddy, relishing the fact that the town tailor is sucking up to him while making him a suit in the hopes that Pip will give him more business. At the end of chapter 19, Pip moves to London, leaving his family behind – he thinks.

The main conflict in the novel is between Pip's perceptions about his great expectations and the reality of what they are.

By "great expectations," Dickens means that Pip has a benefactor who is educating him and funding him to rise above his class and become a wealthy gentleman. Until his secret benefactor starts sending him money, Pip's best expectation is to become a blacksmith like Joe.

But Dickens plays on the words great expectations. Pip's personal great expectation is that Miss Havisham is funding his rise in the world and grooming him to become a suitable husband for Estella. This expectation pleases and flatters him, for Miss Havisham is upper class (if very strange), and he is in love with Estella.

But, in fact, Pip has to come to grips with the reality that his great expectations are, to his horror, being funded by the convict Magwitch, who has lived "rough" in order to repay Pip for saving his life. Pip has to learn that what we "expect" isn't necessarily the way life works out--and that maybe that is for the best. For Pip learns who has true worth in the world: it isn't a "gentlewoman" like Miss Havisham, whose heart has been warped by circumstances to become cruel and hard. Instead, it rests in a despised, lower class person who doesn't allow harsh circumstances to warp him but instead behaves with pure heartedness and generous gratitude. It lies too in Joe, who Pip can expect greater things from than his snobbish gentlemen acquaintances.

There are two predominant conflicts in Great Expectations. The first is in the conflict category of Human against Human while the second is Human against Self. From the beginning Pip is set-up in a position of double conflict with Estella (Human against Human). Miss Havisham wants to (1) use Pip to punish mankind for her betrayal at the alter. Her clever scheme is to (2) cause Pip to fall in love with Estella who has been taught to scorn males with a cold, proud vanity that is unyielding. This conflict is resolved at the end of the story when Estella confess that she continued in "remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth" and Pip reciprocates with "in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her."

As his tutelage under Miss Havisham continues, and he attributes his fortune to her, Pip comes to be in conflict with himself (Human against Self) as he learns to adopt as he own the proud and arrogant ways that Miss Havisham and Estella epitomize. Pip comes to scorn anything and anyone who does not stand up to their measure, including good but rough Joe who has only Pip's best interests at heart. When Pip promises Magwitch that he will always stay by his side, he offers tangible proof that he has overcome this conflict and has shed the domination of Estella's and Miss Havisham's hatred and pride.

"I will never stir from your side," said I, "when I am suffered to be near you. Please God, I will be as true to you as you have been to me!"

Class conflict is alive and well in Dickens' England.  Through Great Expectations, Dickens illustrates that money and family name do not equate with morality and charitableness.  Below are several examples of class struggles.

1. Magwitch (also Provis) despises Compeyson (Miss Havisham's ex-fiance).  While it is true that Compeyson is part of the reason that Magwitch was arrested and imprisoned, it is also true that Compeyson committed the same (if not worse) crimes as Magwitch, yet he receives a lighter sentence because he is a member of the upper class.  Magwitch makes several comments about this, and his hatred for the unequal treatment that he and Compeyson receive spurs him to make his own gentleman out of Pip, a member of the struggling working class.  In the end, although Magwitch never achieves "gentlemanly" status in the eyes of society, he redeems himself and demonstrates that morality is not linked to social class.

2. Most significantly, Pip at first believes that people such as Miss Havisham and, therefore, Estella and other suitors for Estella's hand are what he should emulate.  The upper class of society has made him feel insignificant; so he strives to become a gentleman so that he can fit in and hopefully find purpose.  What Pip discovers, however, is that none of the people whom he meets from England's "aristocracy" are happy or worth of emulation.  Unfortunately, before he matures in his view of social classes, he treats Joe and Magwitch badly and even forgets the values he was taught early on in life.  By the novel's end, though, Pip returns to his roots, and Dickens uses his character to show that good-hearted people are that way by nature, not by class.

There are a number of conflicts that feature in this complex novel. One of the most important ones in my view, however, is the way in which the behaviour of gentlemen is contrasted with that of gentle men. Let me explain my point. Pip, from his very first visit to Satis House, thinks that becoming a gentleman, or a man of wealth and status in society, will be the answer to all of his worries and concerns. He becomes fixated on improving his position in life. However, what he fails to realise straight away is that having social status and money is not something that necessarily guarantees that you will behave in a good and proper way.

The novel contains plenty of examples of characters who defy Pip's understanding of what it is to be a gentleman. For example, if we examine the character of Compeyson, he is clearly an individual who is a gentleman but uses his position to profit himself and trick and cheat others. He is definitely not a gentle man, in spite of having all of the benefits of his position. In the same way, poor Joe is definitely not a gentleman, as his disastrous visit to London to see Pip and his inability to fit in shows. However, note with what grace and understanding he delivers his final speech before leaving Pip:

Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Diwisions among such must come, and must be met as they come.

The irony of this speech is that Pip, who is know a gentleman, has greeted his friend in a completely ungentleman-like manner. Joe, although he is clearly not a gentleman, responds with grace and forgiveness in a way that shows he is a true gentle man.

Dickens again and again illustrates through this conflict that having wealth and status does not necessarily make you a gentle man.