Certainly, there are imperial subtexts to Great Expectations. An English man writing in the middle third of the 19th century, obviously Dickens carried a set of attitudes towards the Empire and its relationship to the Condition of England. As his satire of Scrooge’s obsession with decreasing the “surplus population” by letting people die showed in A Christmas Carol, Dickens hated Malthusianism. But his alternative to addressing the consequences of population growth during industrialisation was imperial emigration.

The actual expression of Dickens’s own worldview clearly does not though interest Knight. In his telling, Pip equates becoming a successful gentleman with getting rich in the colonies, while Dickens packed off characters to the colonies who could not succeed materially or morally in England. They either went voluntarily, like Micawber in David Copperfield, or as prisoners, like Magwitch in Great Expectations and the sadistic Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. In Great Expectations, Pip’s friend Herbert moves to Cairo to practise merchant shipping because he gets nowhere in business in London, and an indebted Pip joins him when he realises even a life in Kent is no longer possible for him. Indeed, Dickens sent five of his seven sons, whom he deemed likely failures, to imperial life: one to the East India Company, one to the Bengal Mounted Police, two to Australia, and another to the Navy. (Walter Dickens died aged 22 trying to get back home from India and is buried in Calcutta.) Only Dickens’s eldest son, Charles junior, and the one successful son, Henry, were allowed to stay in England.

Great Expectations is also concerned with ignorance about the source of inherited wealth. Magwitch’s return to England, after he made a fortune farming in the penal colony of Australia, is a brutal revelation for Pip, whose whole view of his London life rests on him mistaking the surface of things for reality. As Pip assumes wealth breeds wealth, Magwitch’s lower-class toils initially incite “abhorrence”. His first instinct is to hide the truth and exile Magwitch, so that he can resume his gentlemanly ways. But Pip has to learn to see Magwitch as a flesh and blood human being to whom he owes gratitude. For Dickens, the Magwitch story has a symbolic purpose: the return of unbearable knowledge about the price another has paid abroad. While he does not make clear that farming in Australia means farming appropriated land, the point is there to be made.

By contrast, Knight’s telling traduces the literal Magwitch-Pip story and robs it of its human and thematic heart. Knight’s miss on the Pip-Magwitch relationship is part of his whole approach to Pip. Dickens’s novels are populated by memorable, strange characters and Pip is one of them. Pip’s entire consciousness arises from a moment on a “raw afternoon towards evening” when he fearfully learns “the identity of things”: that he is in a churchyard, that he is an orphan, that the surrounding “wilderness” is the marshes, that the beyond is the river, that the wind comes from the “savage lair” of the sea, and that “the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, [i]s Pip”. Just as he has articulated this litany to himself, Magwitch arrives from behind his parents and siblings’ graves, crying “keep still you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat”. Rather than possessing any childhood faculty of wonder, Pip has a darkened and guilt-ridden Gothic imagination. After an acquaintance of Magwitch turns up one night at the village pub to give Pip money, he conjures images of the man shooting him with an “invisible gun”. Fighting Herbert, he feels like “a species of savage young wolf”. By his adolescence, he reprehends himself for things he has not even done.

In starting Pip’s story with him reciting Malvolio’s lines on greatness from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Knight offers a more familiar, and less striking character: the intelligent boy from the provinces knowingly superior to those around him and desperate to leave what is beneath him behind. This Pip neither needs nor has a dark alter-ego whereas in the novel the journeyman at the forge, Orlick, expresses in action what lurks in Pip’s inner consciousness.

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This set-up lessens the shame that comes upon Pip arriving home from Satis House, and it misses entirely what a strange kind of snob Pip becomes. Pip’s whole conception of the superior life he wants to live is shaped not by visions of grandeur, but the decay of a world a touch of natural light away from turning to dust. Pip knows that the attempt to rewrite the laws of Creation at Satis House is disturbing his mind. On his first trip, he momentarily sees Miss Havisham as a terrifying spectre calling to him, yet afterwards “Miss Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appear to have something to do with everything that was picturesque”. On one beautiful summer day, as afternoon turns to evening — the same hour of the day in winter he meets Magwitch — ­he walks with Biddy, the woman who he knows he should love, along the river. He begins to wonder if he “was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbour by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella”. But, as he says of such moments, the “confounding remembrance of the Havisham days would fall upon [him] like a destructive missile, and scatter [his] wits”.

Dickens’s Pip fails to succeed at making money in the capital city because his mind is so distorted that he can see little clearly beyond the reality of Estella’s character. Even after Magwitch reveals his secret, Pip imagines that the wind and the rain had for weeks been carrying “mysterious warnings” from the “wicked spirit” of Magwitch because this is the kind of Gothic script that runs in his mind.

Although it is too late for him to lead the life he could have led if his imagination had not been warped, Pip’s arc is his return to the world of natural light, where he finds forgiveness. In his final confrontation with his alter-ego in the pitch blackness of a sluice-house on the marshes, Pip feels on the brink of death, until a “gleam of light” comes in through the door. After he begins to recover from his illness, he realises spring has emerged from the death of winter and he can see the physical beauty of the marshes. By contrast, Miss Havisham, while forgiven by Pip, dies in the darkness of fire, reflecting “her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like … other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world”.

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Pip’s journey back to the realm of light cannot be told in Knight’s series because as well as making Pip’s ambition so conventional, he sanitises Satis House and its occupants. Olivia Coleman’s Miss Havisham is not a quasi-mythical character enveloped in decay, in the grip of the notion that her suffering demands the entire passage of time with its rotation of light and darkness stop. Instead, she is a relatively energetic woman in her wedding dress surrounded by obvious wealth in a house where there are more than a few glimpses of daylight. Far from darkening her, her opium-taking brightens her.

Dickens was in good part a Christian storyteller writing stories of redemption. That is a part of why he was so popular and why he endures. It matters that as he moves towards the light Pip learns to love Magwitch, and in freeing himself from his self-corruption can love Joe again. There is nothing at all wrong with any adaptor of Dickens looking at what politically underpins Dickens’s literal story to draw out more of the historical world underneath this tale. Dickens was a realist writer, too, who very much worked out his religious stories in the concrete setting of England. But to rewrite Great Expectations as a vehicle for a historically driven story to which Pip’s pilgrimage is incidental is to violate the whole hope Dickens invested in storytelling.

The point is to get students to reflect on what is often immediately apparent about a person — such as sex, age, physical build, race — and what emerges with longer acquaintanceship. Students may bring up things like accents, levels of education or cultural knowledge — but almost always a little nervously, as if not quite sure if these are legitimate objects of interest. I’ve never had a student spontaneously suggest that one thing you might notice is somebody’s social class, and embarrassment always comes from my suggesting it. These days, it’s just not what the novelist should be thinking about.

Douglas Stuart’s debut novel Shuggie Bain, for instance — a coming-of-age story set in working-class Glasgow — was sufficiently out of fashion to lead 30 publishers to reject the manuscript. After its eventual release, it became a huge triumph. This week, Stuart publishes another novel set in the same world.

Young Mungo follows a boy whose mother is a hopeless alcoholic on the breadline; his elder brother is a thuggish criminal, living with his underage girlfriend and their baby. But his sister, Jodie, is intelligent, orderly, practical, full of possibilities: “She’s gonnae be a doctor, or an astronaut.” Mungo has ambitions, too, although he has never been outside the East End of Glasgow. He falls in love with Jamie, and together they dream of escape. But it’s not a geographical escape; there’s no doubt that it’s their social class they need to leave.

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Such frank investment in social improvement now seems unusual in a novel. Stuart knows better; in an interview he has remarked that the one positive consequence of the urban deprivation he observes is that it gave rise to masterpieces of the written word. But few novelists would be brave enough to write of Jodie’s future as a place where she “would round out her vowels and suppress her glottal stop; she would like her bread to be brown and her films to be foreign”. The urge to better oneself through education is not something novelists want to be seen praising. After all, it might look as if you thought some people were better than others, and even that some of the people left behind, like Mungo, who “would work where he could, and he would steal what he could,” might bear some responsibility for their own lives. If you’ve invented all of these cases, the misbehaviour starts to look fairly terrible to the contemporary eye. And so the subject of social advancement has largely been left to the memoirists, who can at least show that they are writing the truth, or at least “their” truth.

But social class — how people may be trapped in their circumstances, and struggle to escape them — has been at the core of the novel since the beginning. The form thrives on the differences between people, and the place people take in the world. They can be as vast as between Dickens’s Lady Dedlock and Jo the crossing sweeper, or as minute, but real, as those between Austen’s Emma and her vulgar enemy Mrs Elton. But we have to be able to tell characters apart for the novel to make sense; a story set in a society where social differences had been genuinely erased might be quite hard to follow.

Novels, too, are dynamic forms. They tell of changes in circumstances, and how characters end up in places they could not foresee. Very often, these journeys are social odysseys. Defoe’s Moll Flanders, rampaging through rich merchants and bankers as husbands before ending up as a common thief, starts it off. Proust’s Madame Verdurin, starting in obscure circumstances and ending as the Princesse de Guermantes, is an almost indecently frank example; Elizabeth Taylor’s Angelica Deverell shows that the habit of rising in society is not forbidden to artists and writers. All in all, it is not just class that has always driven the novel, but how it changes.

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But now, through a combination of nervousness, embarrassment, and an apparent concern by novelists that their observations on difference shouldn’t be mistaken for snobbishness, the subject is being cast aside. In part, I think, this is because social class seems much more complex and puzzling than it used to be. What to make of a Russian oligarch with his house in Belgrave Square? Or the Syrian professor and refugee, now driving an Uber to get by?

In part, too, it must be affected by a general squeamishness about making personal observations of a specific sort. Some readers have started to object when a novelist makes a factual note about a character’s physical nature, or their race. This style of objection might be making novelists nervous about plain statements of class. You can talk about a character’s wealth or poverty, but it is quite hard to imagine a serious novelist writing about a character’s relationship to money and status in the direct and contemptuous way Evelyn Waugh writes about John Beaver, or Rex Mottram.

What we call class is a complex but coherent association of culture, power, money, behaviour, speech and — more now than 50 years ago — education. It’s a compelling subject, but, strikingly, we seem only to be comfortable with it in fiction in the safely removed form of the historical novel or novels of different cultures: the Indian novel in English still talks bluntly about social status. Novelists who made their mark with exquisitely differentiated fiction about class, such as Martin Amis or William Trevor, are markedly dropping out of fashion.

What is taking the place of this traditionally central concern? The main interests of the novel now are such things as race, particularly racial injustice, sex and sexual preference, and (a surprisingly common interest) the world as seen by individuals who are somehow hindered by an external factor, such as a mental illness. Indeed, perhaps Stuart gets away with his analysis of class because both his novels are also concerned with one of these external factors, gay male sexuality. These factors will successfully distinguish characters; they will do a good job of showing how an individual is treated by society. They are all important and interesting subjects. But as motors of fiction they have one marked limitation — they are all unchangeable characteristics.

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In Great Expectations, Pip’s story of transforming himself into a gentleman powerfully drives the narrative through a minute attention to a shifting social standing. It’s hard to imagine how a novel focused on these other fictional concerns — even if it could reveal how essential and insurmountable differences between people often become apparent through crushing injustice — could reproduce such a journey.

Perhaps there is a larger pressure at work here, about a sort of social media-driven desire on the novelist to present themselves in as amiable a light as possible. A novelist who writes with their full attention on racial status in a post-imperial society is obviously commendably engaged; a novelist who writes about the different styles of speech of rich and poor is running the risk of being labelled the worst of men, a rampant snob. It might be easier to suppress those observations altogether, however conspicuous and interesting they are.

I walk my dog most mornings in Battersea Park. There, a huge range of society mixes; young professionals, retired working class families, those in social housing, and the seriously rich of Chelsea. You would have to be unusually slow not to register the dramatic differences between some of these people, and how they manifest themselves in behaviour, speech, the names of dogs, even the dogs themselves (Labradors and French bulldogs called Reggie are upper middle class; Alsatians and Staffordshire bull terriers called Killer or Sheba, probably working class). This is the sort of thing that novelists used to be very interested in. Now, it seems to me that there is a disinclination to talk about what is as plain as a pikestaff, because what sort of writer would even try to deduce anything from an Alsatian being called Sheba?

For this reason, Young Mungo, an excellent novel, nevertheless feels somewhat old-fashioned. But it’s very good to see a novelist entering with some of the old gusto into working class culture, exploring how its products might inhabit it, or want to get out of it at the first opportunity. Stuart is rare among contemporary novelists in saying, without the slightest apology, things like: “Clothes are often a signal for social class.” And so they are: and yet we are not expected to notice it, or remark upon it. What this sort of thing is starting to require is real nerve.