Why is Pip ashamed of Joe?

Pip is ashamed because Satis House teaches him that Joe’s manners are evidence of Pip’s own low origin. Estella’s contempt and Miss Havisham’s theater make the forge look like a stain. The shame is social learning, not a natural feeling — Pip loved Joe before he learned to perform gentility.

Dickens makes the shame costly. Joe remains loyal while Pip becomes snobbish, and Pip’s later illness and Joe’s nursing reverse the moral hierarchy Pip thought money had settled. Answering “why” with only “class” is true but thin; the chapters of London vanity and the final reconciliation show how ambition rewires gratitude.