The reading
The bead. The wish to be lifted out of the sphere you were born low in — to have the world's verdict of "common" overturned and be revalued, on a stranger's say-so, into a gentleman with a handsome property and a grand name to match.
Engines
- repricing · content · spine · ~ — Pip is held back by being correctly placed and contemptuously valued as low: "Why, he is a common labouring-boy!" — a sting he turns on himself ("I took the opportunity… to look at my coarse hands and my common boots… they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages"). The release is a pure repricing decree from Jaggers: "the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations… that he will come into a handsome property… that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life… and be brought up as a gentleman." Held-back-by-others'-valuation → released-by-recognition, exactly.
The bundle. Single dominant wish — the upward re-valuation. The mystery of the patron and the convict are the machinery of the repricing, not separate engines.
Dual-use read. Repricing's counterfeit is the hollow re-valuation — being elevated by someone else's money and verdict rather than by what you actually are. Unusually, Great Expectations runs the counterfeit deliberately: it grants the payout in full and then spends the back half indicting it (the fortune comes from Magwitch, the gentility is empty, "my great expectations had all dissolved"). It is the engine staged and exposed — the bright pole and its forgery in one book.
Verdict. Repricing's canonical specimen, and a rare self-aware one: a classic that delivers the revaluation wish in a single famous decree, then reveals the wish itself as the trap.
Evidence. ~ reviewed — Project Gutenberg #1400; slot quotes confirmed against the text (the "common labouring-boy" verdict, ch. 8; the "coarse hands and common boots" wound, ch. 8; the "great expectations… removed from his present sphere of life" decree, ch. 18).