Great Expectations
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes.
The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
Overall, Great Expectations received near universal acclaim. Not all reviews were favourable, however; Margaret Oliphant's review, published May 1862 in Blackwood's Magazine, vilified the novel. Critics in the 19th and 20th centuries hailed it as one of Dickens's greatest successes although often for conflicting reasons: G. K. Chesterton admired the novel's optimism; Edmund Wilson its pessimism; Humphry House in 1941 emphasized its social context. John Hillis Miller wrote in 1958 that Pip is the archetype of all Dickensian heroes. In 1970, Q. D. Leavis suggested "How We Must Read Great Expectations". In 1984, Peter Brooks, in the wake of Jacques Derrida, offered a deconstructionist reading. The most profound analyst is probably Julian Moynahan, who, in a 1964 essay surveying the hero's guilt, made Orlick "Pip's double, alter ego and dark mirror image".
In 2015, the BBC polled book critics outside the UK about novels by British authors; they ranked Great Expectations fourth on the list of the 100 Greatest British Novels. Earlier, in its 2003 poll The Big Read concerning the reading taste of the British public, Great Expectations was voted 17th out of the top 100 novels chosen by survey participants.
Excerpted from Great Expectations on Wikipedia.
Great Expectations
| Author | Charles Dickens |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Genre | Adventure, Bildungsromans, Literary Fiction, Sensation novel |
| Copyright | Public domain worldwide. |
| Book cover | "Escaped convict Magwitch" Artist: Clayton Clarke ("Kyd") | wikimedia |
| Ebooks | Project Gutenberg. |
| Scans | Internet Archive. |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive Reader: Mark F. Smith 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 |
| Read online | Great Expectations I, II |
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