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Teaching Great Expectations
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations is a set text for GCSE English Literature with several exam boards, and one of the most-taught novels in English secondary schools. Teaching it well requires balancing the specific demands of the exam (extract analysis, contextual understanding, evaluative writing) with the deeper work of helping teenagers connect to a nineteenth-century novel.
About this video
The novel presents specific pedagogical challenges. Its length is intimidating for weaker readers. Its language, while more accessible than some Victorian fiction, still contains vocabulary and syntactic complexity pupils will need to unpick. Its themes — social class, guilt, redemption, the corrupting effect of wealth, the possibility of moral change — are timeless but require careful mediation for adolescent readers to see themselves in.
The best teaching tends to treat the novel as both artefact and story. As artefact, pupils need contextual knowledge: Victorian class structure, transportation to Australia, the marriage laws that trap Estella, Dickens's serial publication and how it shaped the plot. As story, they need help feeling the shape of Pip's moral journey — his early shame, his rise into false gentility, his gradual reckoning with his own snobbery, his final self-knowledge. Neither dimension works without the other.
For exam preparation specifically, extract analysis needs practising throughout the study, not left to revision. Pupils need to develop the discipline of close reading — noticing individual word choices, sentence structures, punctuation — while holding the whole novel in mind. The strongest essay responses always show that dual attention: what is happening in this extract and how it fits into the novel's broader arc.
Threads worth pulling through the novel
- Pip's moral journey. Track his changing view of Joe from Chapter 1 to the end. This gives pupils an accessible spine for a study of the whole novel.
- The corrupting effect of "expectations". Watch what happens to Pip when he becomes rich — and why the novel treats this as a fall.
- Class and identity. Magwitch and Miss Havisham as opposite embodiments of what wealth does when it has no love in it.
- Guilt. A pattern from Pip's stolen file for Magwitch onward. Guilt shapes the whole novel and its ending.
- Female characters. Estella, Miss Havisham, Biddy, Mrs Joe — Dickens's treatment of women is one of the most productively critiqued dimensions of the novel.
Discussion prompts
- What is the hardest thing about the novel for your pupils to access, and what have you tried to bridge that gap?
- How do you handle the tension between "cover the whole novel" and "teach specific chapters deeply enough for exam extract analysis"?
- Which of the novel's themes lands most strongly with contemporary adolescents? Why?
Try this in your classroom
- Use the "changing view of Joe" thread as a running annotation task through the novel. By Chapter 59 pupils have their own longitudinal argument to make.
- Do one lesson explicitly on Dickens's serial publication and how it shaped the novel. Show pupils the original monthly parts.
- For extract analysis, model a full response yourself first, thinking aloud through the choices you're making. Pupils rarely see the process behind a polished essay.