Theme of Social Class Exposed in Great Expectations.

During the Christmas dinner in chapters 4 and 5 of Great Expectations, Charles Dickens uses the adults' behaviour to satirize the hypocrisy and obsession with social status in Victorian society. 

Here is how the social class plays out during the dinner scene. 

Uncle Pumblechook is a wealthy corn-chandler, who considers himself superior to Joe, a blacksmith.  He treats Pip with condescension, constantly lecturing him to be grateful to those who brought him up by hand.  He brings two bottles of wine to dinner, a symbol of his higher economic status, which Mrs Joe fawns over because she aspires to middle class respectability. 

The adults at the table --- Pumblechook,  Hubbles, and Wopsle -- constantly criticize Pip, comparing him. to a criminal or swine.  In Victorian class system, children of lower class families were often viewed as economic burdens.  Pip is denied a voice, forced to eat in a corner, and given the worst cuts of meat, reflecting his lowly, powerless position at the bottom of household hierarchy. 

Joe represents the true working class.  While the others use dinner to boast, drink, and put on airs of middle class superiority Joe shows genuine kindness.  He repeatedly spoons gravy into Pip's plate to comfort him during the verbal attacks.  Dickens uses this contrast to show that true nobility comes from the character, and not from wealth or social standing. 

When the soldiers burst in looking for the blacksmith to fix the handcuffs, Pumblechook immediately shifts from a pompous bully to sycophant. He offers the soldiers wine and tries to act like an authority directing the operation.  This highlights the middle-class insecurity. The parallel of this scene is replicated everywhere in modern times; from home to office, and from politics to religion.  Pumblechook desperately tries to align himself with the institutional power of the state to elevate himself.