How is the theme of guilt developed in Great Expectations, and how this has affected Pip's life?

Guilt is a significant theme in Great Expectations and plays a major part in Pip's life. In his formative years, he's constantly made to feel guilty by his sister about still being alive while his parents and five brothers are lying buried in the churchyard. Mrs. Joe, as is her wont, also constantly reminds Pip how lucky he is that she's been so generous in raising him. This in turn merely compounds his guilt at putting Mrs. Joe to so much trouble.
Such a guilt-ridden upbringing inevitably bears heavily upon Pip's interactions with the outside world. When he encounters Magwitch on the Romney Marshes, although on the face of it absolutely terrified, Pip nonetheless instinctively feels a certain kinship with the escaped convict. He's been made to feel so guilty for just about everything that's happened in his short life that he might as well be one of those wretched criminals festering away on that prison ship hell-hole. So one could reasonably argue that Pip's almost-pathological guilt is as much a motivation for helping Magwitch as fear. When Pip steals the food from the larder and a file from the forge there's no prizes for guessing what emotion he feels later on.
Try as he might, Pip just cannot escape the burden of guilt. Even a change of scenery doesn't do him much good in that regard. As a young gentleman and man about town Pip is naturally keen to forget his humble background. Unfortunately, this leads to his treating Joe with ill-disguised snobbery and disdain. Joe has been the best friend that Pip could ever have had, and yet he treats him as an embarrassing reminder of his true social origins. After Joe leaves, Pip is wracked with guilt once more.
Yet guilt ultimately serves a didactic function for Pip. That is to say it teaches him a number of very important life lessons. His good fortune in life has come from a hardened criminal, a man guilty of many crimes over many years. Pip's status as a gentleman of quality is a direct consequence of someone else's guilt. Not just his status, but also a certain wisdom offer a profound understanding of the fundamental connection we share with one another.
Pip is guilty; Magwitch is guilty; ultimately, we're all guilty of something or other. This universal guilt binds us all together in a gigantic human drama in which we all play a part. The basic unity it embodies dissolves the artificial differences between the blacksmith and the gentleman, the convict and the lawyer, old money and new. Guilt is a unifying theme in the development of humanity, especially since the dawn of Christianity, and is represented in miniature by Pip's convoluted journey to wisdom and understanding.