Great Expectations was written by Charles Dickens around the time of 1860-1861 and was initially written as a periodical for a newspaper. The story centres around Pip, who is the main character of the book, and is written in the style of first person narrative. The book is written from the viewpoint of the older Pip as he looks back on his life at key episodes. .
Pip tells his story from the time when he is seven, and is an innocent boy from a poor background, until he is twenty-three. One theme of the book is about the realisation of class and how Pip became ashamed of his background and strove, through a mysterious donation of income, to improve himself. In doing this he denied his origins and the people who helped him and loved him. He became arrogant and patronizing and mistreated those he should have valued. Through this process Pip becomes lonely and corrupted. The irony of the story is that the very ones who he had looked upon as being far too inferior of him were the ones who had cared for him the most - Joe Gargery and the convict Magwitch. The realisation that Pip came to from his experiences were that the status and class he had strived for and admired were in fact full of corruption. He goes on to realise that the things and people he had grown to believe were inferior to him were in fact more than his equal. He is filled with remorse by the end of the book and a desire to put right the wrongs he has done to people.
In the first chapter Pip is seven years old and the style of this chapter is very much written as from the viewpoint of a small child and how things appeared to him at that age. Dickens commences the book with these few lines:.
'My father's name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip".
In these opening lines Dickens uses humour to express how Pip first came to call himself Pip.