How to Compare Pip and Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations

AQA likes to test the novel by asking students to compare Pip to another character. This is my top tip for 2018.
Students often struggle to find interesting comparisons and fail to write about Dickens’ purpose.
This resource introduces four big ideas which will allow your students to write confidently about Dickens’ purpose.
It also provides 20 ideas and 20 quotations for them to use in their essay.
Most quotations, as you can see, are detailed, so that you can give your students practice in selecting judiciously, and so that they learn to embed quotations in their sentences.

Below is a sample of the first 4 ideas:

Comparison of Pip and Miss Havisham
The Big Ideas, which should feature as your argument, and in your conclusion.
These points and longer quotations are to help you practise finding the right quotation to embed into your sentences.
They are also the key quotations to use when comparing Pip to Miss Havisham.

1. How Dickens uses the relationship to explore the corrupting power of wealth on those who no longer have a moral purpose in life, which is strongly connected to having proper work.

‘“And you live abroad still?”
“Still.”
“And do well, I am sure?”
“I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore–yes, I do well.”’

1. How Dickens hints that the is a problem of the patriarchy, where a woman can only be defined by marriage, and is not able to forge an identity of her own through proper employment – which he contrasts to Pip and Herbert.

“I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone.”

‘“If you knew all my story,” she pleaded, “you would have some compassion for me and a better understanding of me.”’
3. How her insanity at lost love is only possible in a patriarchal society – Pip does not experience the same level of madness because he can still live a useful and partly fulfilled life without marriage.

1. How she symbolises the proper role of the wealthy, like Scrooge, learning to use her wealth to help others at the end.
   “‘leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why, do you suppose, Pip, she left that cool four thousand unto him? 'Because of Pip’s account of the said Matthew.’”