While many characters in Great Expectations behave unethically, illegally, or simply unkindly, Dickens also demonstrates that redemption can be achieved through kindness, generosity, and honest remorse. Just as class does not ascertain the quality of one’s character, no matter how poor a person’s conduct, they can still turn away from their former lives and become better. Magwitch is one example, transforming from a violent, almost animalistic criminal in the first chapter into a man willing to work hard and sacrifice in order to make Pip's life better—all out of a sense of gratitude. Pip himself achieves redemption as he evolves from a snob who forgets his former loved ones—in particular Joe and Biddy—into a mature adult who realizes that a person’s true worth has nothing to do with titles or money. When Magwitch dies in his prison cell, Pip’s remorse is such that his prayer for Magwitch of “O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!” could as easily apply to himself as to the convict. Pip falls ill after Magwitch’s death, and when Joe visits, Pip finds himself overwhelmed by regret for the way he disdained and abandoned Joe during his brief tenure as a gentleman. Echoing his prayer at Magwitch’s bedside—as well as his outburst of “O God bless you, God forgive you!” when Estella coldly dismisses his feelings for her—he “penitently” begs God to bless Joe.

Even Miss Havisham eventually repents for her sadistic desire to have Estella break Pip’s heart as a way of getting recompense for the way her own heart was broken by her one-time fiancé, Compeyson, decades past. Realizing the pain she has inflicted upon both Pip and Estella, she begs Pip to forgive her, and it is a mark both of Pip’s newfound maturity and of his remorse for his own mistakes that he is able to do so. Estella, too, is afforded a measure of redemption through the suffering she is forced to endure at the hands of her cruel husband, Bentley Drummle. When she unexpectedly meets with Pip in the ruins of Satis house eleven years after Pip’s departure for Cairo, all of Estella’s former pride and aloofness is gone, and her only hope is that Pip will continue to extend her forgiveness. In words befitting the terms of Pip’s own redemption, she tells him, “I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.”