A good friend recommended that I read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I had some doubts.

“Isn’t he a misogynistic woman-hater who ends every story by getting characters to conform to the status quo of a hideous class system?”

“Well, yes,” I was told. “But he is very funny.”

It wasn’t long before I sat down to read the classic. It’s a sizeable novel – the kind I used to refer to as burglar bashers during the hallowed days of my English degree.

I told myself I had to get it read before the BBC aired their adaptation, and I was sucked in.

For anyone who has managed to avoid the novel at school and three hours of it on TV, Great Expectations is a tale of one boy’s ambition in a Victorian age of austerity.

It appeals to a current cultural fascination with the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Downton Abbey and Sherlock Holmes have all graced our TV and cinema screens of late, while we’ve seen recent film adaptations of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Jayne Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

All these present seductive fairy tales for an audience faced with a global financial meltdown. They suggest that frugality and thrift are honest, while allowing us to enjoy the riches of the upper classes.

For example, the Great Expectations narrative sees Pip propelled into wealthy society by an anonymous benefactor. But everyman Pip learns that his financial backer is a convict and he tumbles out of his high class community.

The moral subtext of this tale, perhaps, is that we should be contented with our lot in life. Because, while we can admire the grandeur and opulence of the higher classes, they are not really for us.

Dickens suggests we should just be grateful we’re not starving and being clipped round the ear by our blacksmith brother-in-law.

Is this a sensible lesson for modern times? I’m not sure. But it is a very funny book.