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But only in one of its aspects is Great Expectations a tale of violence, revenge, and retribution.

Money, so important a theme elsewhere in Dickens, is here central, and hands are often associated in some way with the false values -- acquisitiveness, snobbery, self-interest, hypocrisy, toadyism, irresponsibility, injustice -- that attach to a society based upon the pursuit of wealth.

Dickens suggests the economic evils of such a society on the first page of his novel in the description of Pip's five little dead brothers `` who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle '', who seemed to have `` all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence ''.

Pip's great expectations, his progress through illusion and disillusionment, turn, somewhat as they do for the naive hero of Dreiser's American Tragedy, upon the lure of genteel prosperity through unearned income -- what Wemmick calls `` portable property '' and what Jaggers reproaches Pip for letting `` slip through ( his ) fingers ''.