Dickens' Great Expectations of waste, Part 1

I recently dreamed up the idea of reading Great Expectations as an allegory of the waste management industry. It is a reading that is challenging me, but fun all the same.

To start, I've tried to give each of the key characters in the novel a theme in waste management. Here's what I ended up with:

• Pip, the central character, is the industry itself.
• Joe Gargery, Pip’s step-father and a blacksmith, represents Pip’s core, his roots. This could be interpreted as the working class, but perhaps more broadly, it is the public at large.
• The wealthy spinster Miss Havisham, who lives in the shadow of inherited wealth and the memory of an abandoned wedding, could be seen as to represent the grand old world of waste management. This is a world of wealth, inertia but also somewhere that is seen to open doors. It might be government, it might be the multinational that controls (or seems to control) so much of what happens in waste. It is a world of faded glory.
• Miss Havisham’s adopted daugher, the beautiful Estella with whom Pip falls in love, is then the future of waste flowing from the old world.  Having her formative years in sophisticated Europe, you could see her as being the grand projects of waste processing. This might be incineration or some equally grand “sophisticated” plant. 
• Magwitch, the convict who is the actual source of Pip’s wealth, is really a positive influence. He is the subversive influence, the true entrepreneur who is actually behind everything that is valuable (he makes his wealth in New South Wales), and it is Magwitch who actually advances Pip. As it turns out, he is also the father of Estella.

With these themes shoehorned into story characters, it is now a matter of telling the story of the waste industry (Pip) as it deals with its Great Expectations.

In re-telling this story, it is also a matter of disrupting what is ultimately a grim narrative for the waste industry (Pip ends up thrown down from his briefly lived high social standing).

Great Expectations. Pip and Magwitch

I have not yet fully developed this re-telling, but hope to have done so tomorrow. Look out for the second instalment! In the meantime, feel free to suggest new themes and/or characters, or to suggest alternatives to mine.