Great Expectations: Lessons on Life and LoveGreat Expectations are simply timeless. It's about everything about life: how loved ones can be loving or violent, how people can choose their own family; how a woman could be pushed to destroy her child, or to give it away; how people can be corrupted, can be redeemed; how your upbringing defines your character and how you can move beyond or embrace that definition; and how, ultimately, love is a choice. Great Expectations, written by Charles Dickens, is a moral book, without any clear moral guidelines. Its language is beautiful, its plot convincing, its characters complex and complete. People, Dickens tells us, are not always what they seem. Not just because they disguised themselves, or hid, or renamed themselves, like Magwitch; not only because those who seem the most beautiful can actually be the most terrible, like Estella. People are not always what they seem because they are never just one thing. The miserable Mrs. Joe becomes almost adorable after her injury; Mrs. Havisham melts (before burning); Magwitch in trouble terrorizes Pip, but in prosperity is his benefactor; The character of Wemmick depends on its location; there is a hint that even Estella, well, is not as cold as her name and nature suggest; and, of course, Pip is first good, then snobbish and debauched, and finally good. Money changes everything except human nature. Human beings change: neither for the better, nor for the worse, and not permanently. People change, then come back. Their changes don't necessarily make them happy. This is the human condition. "It was a memorable day for me," said Pip, after visiting Satis House for the first time, "for it brought great changes in me. But it is the same in all life. Imagine a chosen day struck of and think how different his journey would have been. Stop, you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, without the formation of. the first link of a memorable day ""Great Expectations" is no less instructive because it is not morally precise. That first connection will change you, just like the circumstances of your childhood. It is your own duty (I believe Dickens says so) to change yourself inwardly as you are changed outwardly..