Great Expectations is one of the most famous and much-loved novels by the great master of Victorian prose, Charles Dickens. Like all of his great novels, Great Expectations has Dickens's brilliant use of character and plot-along with an incredible sensibility and sympathy for the way that the British class system was constructed in the nineteenth century. The novel centers around a poor young man by the name of Pip, who is given the chance to make himself a gentleman by a mysterious benefactor.