What does Pip learn about friendship in the novel Great Expectations, and how does Dickens show ways in which friendship can be affected by social...

Pip learns not to base friendship on social class. Instead he learns to recognize that some of the best-hearted and most honest people in the world, the people who are his true friends, come from the lower classes.

Pip spends much of the novel driven by ambition, struggling to become a gentleman so that he can marry Estella. In the process, he snubs his true friend, the working class blacksmith and father figure, Joe. Pip...

Pip learns not to base friendship on social class. Instead he learns to recognize that some of the best-hearted and most honest people in the world, the people who are his true friends, come from the lower classes.

Pip spends much of the novel driven by ambition, struggling to become a gentleman so that he can marry Estella. In the process, he snubs his true friend, the working class blacksmith and father figure, Joe. Pip is likewise horrified and, at first, embarrassed and unappreciative when he discovers that his secret benefactor, the person who set him up as a gentleman, is the rough convict Magwitch. As Pip journeys to maturity he comes to appreciate that the humble Joe and Magwitch, are, in fact, his true friends. He learns that it is not outward status that makes a friend, but the quality of a person's character. 

Through Pumblechook, Dickens shows how friendship can be affected by social class. Pumblechook treats the young Pip badly early on in the novel, for instance feeding him dry bread for breakfast while he, Pumblechook, dines well. Later, as Pip becomes successful and rises to become a gentleman, Pumblechook's manner changes to one of deference and kindness, and then, when Pip becomes poor again, to one of scorn. We see Pip affected as well by the English class system when he avoids Joe after his (Pip's) rise in social station, because he fears Joe wouldn't fit into his new, exalted world.