Great Expectations

Dickens's earlier bildungsroman — warmer, more sentimental, told in first person; Great Expectations is its darker, more ironic revision

Victorian bildungsroman with similar class-and-love tensions — Jane's moral code is more rigidly maintained than Pip's, making her the comparison that shows Pip's failures most clearly

Both novels track the destruction wrought by obsessive self-invention in pursuit of an unattainable ideal — Gatsby is Pip without the self-awareness or Joe Gargery to anchor him

The Victorian satirical twin — Becky Sharp pursues the same upward mobility as Pip but without his guilt, making Thackeray's version darker about human nature

The modernist heir to Great Expectations — Stephen Dedalus's flight from class, religion, and family tracks the same trajectory of self-creation through betrayal of origins

Published the same decade, equally concerned with the class collision between industrial labor and gentility — Gaskell is less comic, more sociological, but shares Dickens's sympathy for those the class system damages