Great Expectations has always been rated among the very greatest of Dickens’ achievements. Great Expectations isn’t complicated or arcane: it speaks to the reader frankly and forcefully. But it doesn’t have a ‘theme’ which can be glibly summarized: it’s simply the story of a middle-aged man attempting an honest examination of his life and coming to terms with his past, his morality, his actions. Pip shouldn’t be equated Dickens and Dickens isn’t Pip, but they are intimately related and one can think of both the novelist and his character as being engaged in the same process of questioning what made them who they are, what values they have lived by and what mistakes they are guilty of.