Why was attacking the other convict and getting caught worth more to Pip's convict than his own freedom in chapter 5?Chapter 5 of Great...

One of the prevailing motifs of certain works of Charles
Dickens such as Oliver Twist and Great
Expectations was that his Victorian society was itself a prison as the
supercilious aristocrats of his time paid no heed to the growing number of homeless and
impoverished that filled the streets of London after the Industrial Revolution.  With
crime rising in London as the desperate found it a means to sustain themselves as they
had no hope of rising above their stations in life,Dickens was himself instrumental in
effecting some reforms such as the repeal of the Poor Laws of 1834
that placed the impoverishedin workhouses where they were doled pitiful meals while
their children were mere gamins of the streets.

Pip's
convict, as the reader later learns, has been one of these gamins who has had to live by
thievery.  From what is stated in Chapter V of Great Expectations,
the reader can infer that there is some connection in the past between the first and
second convicts. For, when the soldiers hear the two convicts, rush to them, and
apprehend them, the second convict screams that the first convict has been trying to
kill him; this claim the first convict adamantly
denies,

Try,
and not do it? I took him, and giv' him up; that's what I done. I not only prevented him
getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here—dragged him this far on his way back.
He's a gentleman, if you please, this villain. Now, the
Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me. Murder him? Worth my while, too, to
murder him, when I could do worse and drag him
back!”

The emphasis upon
telling the sergeant that the second convict is a "gentleman" is suggestive, too, of
Dickens's motif that there was in England a justice for the rich and a different justice
for the poor, a fact that the reader will learn later in the narrative.  The fist
convict continues his explanation,

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“Single-handed I got clear of the prison-ship; I
made a dash and I done it. I could ha' got clear of these death-cold flats likewise—look
at my leg: you won't find much iron on it—if I hadn't made the discovery that
he was here. Let him go free? Let
him profit by the means as I found out? Let
him make a tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no. If I
had died at the bottom there;” and he made an emphatic swing at the ditch with his
manacled hands; “I'd have held to him with that grip, that you should have been safe to
find him in my
hold.”

Evidently, the
gentleman has exploited the first convict in some terrible manner.  And, probably the
gentleman has received less of a sentence that the first convict even though he is the
one responsible for the crime. At any rate, there much animosity between the two
convicts, and the first convict would rather return to prison himself than see the
second one get away with his, the greater crime.