Great Expectations: Lessons on Life and Love Great Expectations is simply timeless. It's about all the things about life: how relatives can be loving or violent, how people can choose their family; how a woman might be driven to destroy her child or give him away; as people can be corrupted, they can be redeemed; how your upbringing defines your character and how you can overcome or embrace that definition; and how, finally, love is a choice. Great Expectations, written by Charles Dickens, is a moral book, without clear moral guidelines. Its language is beautiful, the plot compelling, its characters complex and complete. People, Dickens tells us, are not always what they seem. Not simply because they disguised themselves, hid, or rebranded themselves, like Magwitch; not only because those who appear more beautiful may actually be more terrible, like Estella. People are not always what they seem because people are never just one thing. The wretched Mrs. Joe becomes almost adorable after her injury; Mrs. Havisham melts (before burning); Magwitch in trouble terrifies Pip, but in prosperity he is his benefactor; Wemmick's character depends on his position; there is a hint that even Estella, in the end, is not as brilliantly cold as her name and nature suggest; and, of course, Pip is first good, then snobbish and dissolute, and finally, good. Money changes everything except human nature. Human beings change: not for better, not for worse, and not permanently. People change, then they go back. Their changes don't necessarily make them happy. This is the human condition. “That was a memorable day for me,” says Pip, after visiting Satis House for the first time, “because it made great changes in me. But it's the same with any life. Imagine a selected day being canceled stop, you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, which would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on a memorable day." “Great Expectations” is no less instructive for not being morally defined. That first connection will change you, as will the circumstances of your childhood. It is your duty (I believe Dickens says) to change yourself internally as you have changed externally.