Pope John Paul II described Dickens' book as "filled with love for the poor and a sense of social regeneration...warm with imagination and humanity." Such true charity permeates Dickens's novels and ultimately drives the characters either to choose regeneration or risk disintegration. In Great Expectations, Pip, symbolic of the pilgrim convert, gains both improved fortunes and a growth in wisdom, but as he acquires the latter, he must relinquish the former. That the Diskensian message was a Chr...