Great Expectations: Practice Plan: Ambition, Loyalty and Growth
Build a whole-novel argument about ambition, loyalty and Pip's development. Select evidence, connect methods with context and order the plan so that each section advances your judgement.
Understand the practice task
Study all 59 chapters of Great Expectations: Chapters 1–19 form Stage One, 20–39 Stage Two and 40–59 Stage Three. Whole-text responses draw on this complete development.
This is original coursework practice for Assignment B. The full response receives one holistic mark out of 30: AO1 (understanding), AO2 (methods) and AO4 (context) are equally weighted, without separate subscores. Coursework develops over reading, planning and revision; it is not a timed Paper 2 task.
How does Charles Dickens use language, form and structure to present how ambition and loyalty shape Pip's moral development across Great Expectations? Relate your interpretation to relevant contexts.
Now decode the wording before selecting evidence:
| Prompt wording | Planning consequence |
|---|---|
| “How does Charles Dickens use” | Explain constructed effects; do not merely identify a technique. |
| “language, form and structure” | Plan meaningful variety across the response, including narrative and whole-text choices. |
| “ambition and loyalty” | Explain their relationship; do not plan two disconnected theme lists. |
| “shape Pip's moral development” | Trace causes and changes in Pip's values and conduct. |
| “across” | Use a whole-text spread rather than one revealing episode. |
| “relevant contexts” | Choose context because it changes the interpretation of particular evidence. |
The central relationship can be expressed as a planning chain:
- Learned class shame gives Pip's ambition a distorted direction.
- Gentlemanly performance and the benefactor revelation expose the cost and dependence hidden inside that ambition.
- Loyalty without social or financial reward tests whether Pip can value people differently.
- Later work and return suggest growth, while lateness, dependence and loss keep it qualified.
This chain is not yet a thesis or a paragraph plan. It establishes what the final route must explain.
Build a working judgement
A working judgement is a provisional answer that controls selection. It should be arguable enough to test and flexible enough to improve as evidence is compared.
For this prompt, the judgement needs four decisions:
- Initial direction: what does Pip's early ambition make him value or reject?
- Turning force: how does loyalty challenge or redirect those values?
- Development: what changes in Pip's conduct or judgement?
- Qualification: what prevents the ending from proving simple perfection?
A useful construction frame is:
Dickens first presents ambition as ______ because ______; through ______, loyalty redirects
Pip towards ______, although his growth remains ______ because ______.
The blanks must contain causal ideas, not plot labels. Compare the difference:
| Weak planning statement | Stronger working judgement |
|---|---|
| Pip is ambitious and later becomes loyal. | Pip's status ambition begins in learned self-rejection, while loyalty later teaches him to value care above reward. |
| Pip becomes a better person. | Pip's changed treatment of Magwitch and Joe shows substantial growth, but that growth is late and dependent on the people he previously misjudged. |
| Dickens says ambition is bad. | Dickens distinguishes ambition directed towards display from ambition redirected towards responsible work and reciprocity. |
The second and third judgements can coexist. Pip need not abandon every desire to improve. Instead, the object and moral basis of ambition can change. This produces a more discriminating argument than either "ambition is always wrong" or "Pip is completely reformed".
Loyalty also needs qualification. Joe's constancy is not the same as Magwitch's mixture of gratitude, paternal feeling and the wish to make a gentleman by proxy. A plan can argue that loyalty educates Pip without pretending that every loyal attachment in the novel is simple or unpossessive.
Build a whole-text evidence ledger
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 14
[1] It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.
[2] Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.
[3] How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault, how much Miss Havisham’s, how much my sister’s, is now of no moment to me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.
[4] Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe’s ’prentice, I should be distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal, and that I had a weight upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 34
[1] We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 39
[1] I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my life. I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my breast, where I seemed to be suffocating,—I stood so, looking wildly at him, until I grasped at the chair, when the room began to surge and turn. He caught me, drew me to the sofa, put me up against the cushions, and bent on one knee before me, bringing the face that I now well remembered, and that I shuddered at, very near to mine.
[2] “Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec’lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard, that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman,—and, Pip, you’re him!”
[3] The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.
[4] “Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son,—more to me nor any son. I’ve put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men’s and women’s faces wos like, I see yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my dinner or my supper, and I says, ‘Here’s the boy again, a looking at me whiles I eats and drinks!’ I see you there a many times, as plain as ever I see you on them misty marshes. ‘Lord strike me dead!’ I says each time,—and I goes out in the air to say it under the open heavens,—‘but wot, if I gets liberty and money, I’ll make that boy a gentleman!’ And I done it. Why, look at you, dear boy! Look at these here lodgings of yourn, fit for a lord! A lord? Ah! You shall show money with lords for wagers, and beat ’em!”
[5] In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been nearly fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It was the one grain of relief I had.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 54
[1] We remained at the public-house until the tide turned, and then Magwitch was carried down to the galley and put on board. Herbert and Startop were to get to London by land, as soon as they could. We had a doleful parting, and when I took my place by Magwitch’s side, I felt that that was my place henceforth while he lived.
[2] For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away; and in the hunted, wounded, shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe.
[3] His breathing became more difficult and painful as the night drew on, and often he could not repress a groan. I tried to rest him on the arm I could use, in any easy position; but it was dreadful to think that I could not be sorry at heart for his being badly hurt, since it was unquestionably best that he should die. That there were, still living, people enough who were able and willing to identify him, I could not doubt. That he would be leniently treated, I could not hope. He who had been presented in the worst light at his trial, who had since broken prison and had been tried again, who had returned from transportation under a life sentence, and who had occasioned the death of the man who was the cause of his arrest.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
Text
Great Expectations
By Charles Dickens
Chapter 58
[1] Many a year went round before I was a partner in the House; but I lived happily with Herbert and his wife, and lived frugally, and paid my debts, and maintained a constant correspondence with Biddy and Joe. It was not until I became third in the Firm, that Clarriker betrayed me to Herbert; but he then declared that the secret of Herbert’s partnership had been long enough upon his conscience, and he must tell it. So he told it, and Herbert was as much moved as amazed, and the dear fellow and I were not the worse friends for the long concealment. I must not leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great House, or that we made mints of money. We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well. We owed so much to Herbert’s ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
Notes
Paragraph numbers identify this extract. Original spelling and dialect are retained.
The plan needs a ledger, not a quotation bank. A quotation bank stores memorable wording. An evidence ledger records what a reference can prove, how Dickens makes it meaningful and which contextual relationship it can support.
Begin with the prompt's development line:
| Stage and reference | What it can prove | Productive writerly choice | Contextual relationship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stage One, Chapter 14: Pip is "ashamed of home" | Ambition begins in adopted class shame before London or the fortune. | Retrospective first-person confession locates the moral error inside Pip's changing self-perception. | A development narrative can test whether social advancement and moral growth move together. |
| Stage Two, Chapter 34: "gay fiction" / "skeleton truth" | Gentlemanly display conceals debt and dissatisfaction. | Antithesis and the adult narrator's corrective vocabulary expose the younger Pip's performance. | The social ideal of the gentleman is tested against expenditure, work and inward worth. |
| Stage Two turning point, Chapter 39: "worked hard" / "above work" | Pip's apparent rise depends on Magwitch's labour and loyalty. | Balanced contrast joins the men's fortunes while placing them on opposite sides of labour. | Transportation and colonial earnings complicate an English story of respectable self-making. |
| Stage Three, Chapter 54: Pip's repugnance has "melted away" | Loyalty has become chosen care after the expectation of money disappears. | Changed evaluative language and role reversal turn the beneficiary into a protector. | Moral development depends on relationship and responsibility, not solitary ascent. |
| Chapters 57-59: Joe's care, Pip's debt repayment and later work | Growth becomes visible in conduct, but no act restores the lost years. | Return, parallel and the narrated time gap invite comparison with Pip's earlier dependence. | Work-based self-improvement is partly recovered, though friendship and commerce keep success relational. |
Do not force every row into the final plan. Select the smallest spread that can carry the full judgement. Three well-chosen clusters are often more useful than six scenes that repeat the same claim.
Evidence should be chosen by discriminating power:
- Chapter 14 is stronger than Pip's arrival in London for proving that shame causes the ambition, because the self-rejection is already present.
- Chapter 34 is stronger than a list of purchases for showing performance, because the opposition between fiction and truth interprets the spending.
- Chapter 39's contrast between hard work and being above work joins loyalty, labour, class and false self-making more efficiently than a general statement that Magwitch is the benefactor.
- Chapter 54 is stronger than the revelation alone for proving growth, because Pip acts loyally after the fortune can no longer reward him.
- Chapters 57-59 are useful as qualification: work and repayment show responsibility, but the late return does not erase Joe's earlier hurt or make Pip wholly self-created.
Context earns its place only when it changes a text-led inference. "Transportation happened in the Victorian period" is detached information. By contrast, Magwitch's earnings from work after transportation make Pip's gentlemanly leisure dependent on a labouring, criminalised figure excluded from England. The context exposes a contradiction inside Pip's apparent self-making.
Scholarship on the novel's development pattern also supports a question rather than a borrowed answer: does Pip advance morally when he advances socially, or does social movement produce a period of moral stasis? The plan must answer through Dickens's novel; a critic's name is not a substitute for textual reasoning.
Continue this lesson.
You’re previewing NovaLearn without an account. Create a free account to read the rest.
Create free account