Great Expectations (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Charles Dickens and Radhika Jones

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.

 

Great Expectations, described by G. K. Chesterton as a “study in human weakness and the slow human surrender,” may be called Charles Dickens’s finest moment in a remarkably illustrious literary career.

In an overgrown churchyard, a grizzled convict springs upon an orphan named Pip. The convict terrifies the young boy and threatens to kill him unless Pip helps further his escape. Later, Pip finds himself in the ruined garden where he meets the bitter and crazy Miss Havisham and her foster child Estella, with whom he immediately falls in love. After a secret benefactor gives him a fortune, Pip moves to London, where he cultivates great expectations for a life which would allow him to discard his impoverished beginnings and socialize with the idle upper class. As Pip struggles to become a gentleman and is tormented endlessly by the beautiful Estella, he slowly learns the truth about himself and his illusions.

Written in the last decade of his life, Great Expectations reveals Dickens’s dark attitudes toward Victorian society, its inherent class structure, and its materialism. Yet this novel persists as one of Dickens’s most popular. Richly comic and immensely readable, Great Expectations overspills with vividly drawn characters, moral maelstroms, and the sorrow and pity of love.

Radhika Jones is a doctoral candidate in English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the managing editor of Grand Street magazine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411433830

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer and social critic. Regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, Dickens had a prolific collection of works including fifteen novels, five novellas, and hundreds of short stories and articles. The term “cliffhanger endings” was created because of his practice of ending his serial short stories with drama and suspense. Dickens’ political and social beliefs heavily shaped his literary work. He argued against capitalist beliefs, and advocated for children’s rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens advocacy for such causes is apparent in his empathetic portrayal of lower classes in his famous works, such as The Christmas Carol and Hard Times.

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INTRODUCTION

Whatever expectations Charles Dickens had for his thirteenth novel, he probably did not anticipate that it would someday come to exemplify the Victorian novel itself. But to the countless contemporary readers who follow the adventures of young Pip, the convict he fears, the girl he loves, and the strange old woman he thinks will make his fortune, Great Expectations is in many ways the quintessential nineteenth-century story: part mystery, part bildungsroman, or novel of education, in which our hero, rising above his modest beginnings, moves to London, prospers, and eventually (he hopes) gets the girl. Pip’s course, however, does not run so smoothly, and it is the variations Dickens plays on this theme that prompt us to read Great Expectations both with and against the grain of the Victorian novel. At times it is less an emblem of tradition than a marker of change in both the English society it depicts and the English novel it represents. There are surprises at work in Great Expectations for both its characters and its readers, who bring to it their own expectations of what a novel should be and do.

A caricature of Dickens displayed in bookstores when the first sections of Great Expectations appeared (in serialized form, as was common for novels in the Victorian era) shows the author at his desk, pen in hand, hair standing on end, exuding genius. The caption reads, Charles Dickens, from whom we have Great Expectations. Though the pun is obvious, it is worth recalling for the simple reason that it sounds oddly forward-looking, like something one would say of a promising young writer at the beginning of his career. When Dickens began Great Expectations, at age forty-eight, he already had a dozen novels to his name, as well as countless short stories; he was also an accomplished and experienced editor, a powerful publisher, and a prolific generator of nonfic tion—articles, editorials, sketches, and so on. Thanks to both his own prodigious skills and the remarkable rise in literacy rates in nineteenth-century England and America—a fortuitous combination of talented writer and eager new readership—Dickens was one of the first bona-fide mass-market writers in history, a best-selling author and, as novelist Jane Smiley observes in a recent biography, maybe the first true celebrity in the modern sense. If the world had great expectations of Dickens, those expectations could be only that he would continue to deliver a product of which he himself was the most significant producer: compelling stories that appeared in monthly or weekly installments to entertain and inform. And so the caricature’s caption reminds us of Dickens’s intimate relationship to his readership; the novels he produced went from his pen to their hands with a kind of immediacy that no longer exists in the world of fiction outside of journalism. With every installment of his new novel, Dickens would fulfill expectations, even as he stoked the public’s appetite for more.

The writing of Great Expectations coincided roughly with a new phase in Dickens’s life and career. He had recently left his wife, Catherine, mother of his ten children, and had embarked on a very private affair with a young actress, Ellen Ternan. He had also discontinued his immensely popular weekly journal Household Words, of which he was editor and part-owner, after his copublishers took issue with his decision to print a personal statement, intended to refute rumors about his dissolving marriage, on the front page. Now Dickens was editor of a replacement journal, All the Year Round, in which his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities debuted. Shortly after finishing that work, he began contributing chapters of Great Expectations to boost the circulation, which was sagging due to a lackluster serial by Charles Lever that was then running. (As Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster wryly notes: A tale, which at the time was appearing in his serial, had disappointed expectation.) Dickens called a staff meeting to discuss options, but he had already decided on a course of action: It was time for him to strike in. His faith in his selling power did not go unrewarded; circulation of the weekly rebounded and remained healthy for the rest of Dickens’s career. But his decision had an impact on the story he was envisioning before it even reached the page. According to Forster, Dickens was planning to compose his new novel—for which he had already conceived the pivotal relationship, between a young boy and a convict—in monthly serial form, comprising twenty numbers, which would have made it a much longer work on the scale of such previous hits as Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit. Publishing it in his weekly journal would require Dickens to reconfigure his idea into a shorter book, along the lines of its predecessor, A Tale of Two Cities. The result is a novel more pruned in its plots, more limited in its cast of characters than others of Dickens’s great works. It was a sacrifice, Dickens told Forster, really and truly made for myself—a compromise between Dickens the publisher and Dickens the writer. Thus was Great Expectations born: out of disappointed expectation, transformed from its creator’s original expectation. The meanings inscribed in its title had already begun to multiply.

With twelve novels behind him, Dickens could not afford to proceed without first making certain he was breaking fresh ground, and his correspondence with Forster shows him quite studiously—and somewhat amusingly—taking stock of his oeuvre, placing Great Expectations in contrast to his earlier works before it has even breathed life. "You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in the Tale of Two Cities," he writes in autumn 1860, acknowledging criticism of his last work. (For Dickens, whose career was jump-started in 1836 by the picaresque romp Pickwick Papers, humor was a serious consideration. His public never tired of it—twenty-five years after his death in 1870, Pickwick remained his top seller.) Nor would readers need to worry that, in choosing a young male protagonist as his narrator, Dickens was revisiting paths successfully trodden by his much-loved hero and partial alter-ego David Copperfield some ten years earlier. To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, he assures Forster, "I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe."

Forster views it as a mark of Dickens’s genius that Pip and David, though clearly related, emerge as two distinct sensibilities, and as we shall see, later critics would agree; they would count it as among Dickens’s chief strengths that he could create characters similar enough to bear the burden of comparison even as they react in very dissimilar ways to the machinations of their individual plots. It is this talent, perhaps, that has helped to foster our sense of Dickens’s world as complete unto itself. Just as the author could embark on a new work by setting it in the context of old ones, so can we read any Dickens novel in relation to another, such is the wealth of characters and themes with which they supply us. Great Expectations is remarkable in that in addition to creating its own terrain of interpretation, it offers a kind of reading of its predecessors as well. By demonstrating, through the mishaps of Pip, certain pitfalls associated with the workings of Victorian plots, it digests the novels that have come before it and plays on the very expectations they raised in their readers. Thus Great Expectations earns its title as it instructs us, sometimes bleakly, in the dangers of harboring too-great expectations, in life and in fiction.

What would a reader, then and now, expect of a Victorian novel? More than any other nineteenth-century writer Dickens was instrumental in shaping its form. Pickwick Papers predated the crowning of Queen Victoria by a year, and as Dickens continued to produce fiction through the 1840s,‘50s, and ’60s—along with such figures as the Brontës, as well as Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, who were his protégés—the novel gained strength and legitimacy as a genre; it became the literary show-piece of the Victorian era. It is possible, indeed, to watch it evolve through Dickens’s own prolific career. Pickwick bears a striking resemblance to the early novels of the eighteenth century, the works of Henry Fielding in particular. Light-hearted in tone and spirit, it chronicles the adventures of a group of intrepid gentlemen who eat and drink their way through the English countryside, falling in and out of trouble but never so far as to arouse anxiety. Its most remarkable quality, in contrast to Dickens’s later works, is its lack of a complicated plot; the events of Pickwick unfold anecdotally and seemingly effortlessly, without the kind of master plan evident behind the workings of, say, Bleak House. Moreover, as Dickens gained in popularity, he began to put his fiction to work for social causes: Oliver Twist, for example, responds directly to the recently instituted and vastly unjust Poor Laws of 1834, while Nicholas Nickleby takes to task England’s school system and Little Dorrit its official bureaucracy. And the more focused Dickens’s social critiques became, the more focused his plots grew—for he shared with most writers of the era the sense that, in fiction if not in reality, events could be ordered and arranged to right society’s wrongs and come to a fruitful conclusion.

To understand that general sensibility of the Victorian novel, we might do well to consider it in contrast to what came afterward. The modern novel of the twentieth century coincided with a world that was being wrenched apart—by world wars and revolutions, the roots of de colonization, Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, Einstein’s theories of relativity, the displacements of Picasso, the dissonances of Schoenberg. It represented that world by incorporating those developments not only in content, but in style and form as well: the stream-of-consciousness narration developed by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, for example, which precludes an omniscient narrator and highlights an insistent sub jectivity. In the Victorian novel, that world had not yet come apart. There was pressure on it, to be sure—from figures such as Darwin, whose theories of evolutionary biology would transform the way man was understood to exist in nature, and Charles Lyell, whose account of geological change would require a new conception of historical time. But the novels of the Victorian era demonstrate an overall faith in certain truths: the integrity of the human spirit, the possibility of moral development, the inevitability of scientific progress. Their plots, even the most complex ones, cohere; indeed, they are made complex precisely to emphasize their ultimate coherence. Characters are shown to connect meaningfully to one another. Good intentions are rewarded, evil punished. The novels are comprehensive: They show us extended families and multiple generations, even complete towns, as in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The works themselves, with their intimate and familiar prose styles, establish a direct connection to the reader. They are not only highly readable, but also eminently satisfying in their sense of resolution. Great Expectations follows many of these conventions, particularly those that have to do with plot. But as to the question of satisfaction—the very question a book with the word expectations in its title explicitly raises—it marks a shift both in Dickens’s oeuvre and in the direction of the novel as a whole.

Great Expectations begins in that place where all expectations come irrevocably to an end—a graveyard. In a letter to Forster, Dickens described his idea for the novel’s opening episodes as a grotesque tragic-comic conception (Pip’s encounter with Magwitch) tempered by the light-hearted interaction between the child and a good-natured foolish man (his foster father, Joe Gargery). His description applies to the novel on the whole, for its blend of terror and comedy is one of Great Expectations’s greatest achievements. Pip is introduced at the cemetery, studying the headstones of his father, mother, and five deceased siblings, gaining his first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things from pursuing this morbid pastime on a cold, inhospitable winter afternoon. Observing his infant brothers’ graves, Pip remarks that they gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle (p. 3); this Darwinian language, just entering Victorian discourse (The Origin of Species was published in 1859), reminds us that if Pip is to survive, let alone thrive, he will be forced to struggle himself. Scarcely a page elapses before the fearsome convict appears on the scene. But it is worth noting that before his arrival young Pip is already depicted as a small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry (p. 4); his burgeoning self-awareness, marked by fear and tears, sets the stage for Magwitch’s appearance rather than establishing a contrast to it. The landscape to which Dickens introduces his readers is characterized by death and savagery—of nature and of man—and Magwitch, though he certainly heightens the effect by frightening Pip further, is at ease in that landscape. He belongs there. Whether Pip, as a child, can claim to be innocent of it seems a moot point. Oliver Twist, perhaps Dickens’s best-known orphan, remains miraculously untainted by the crime and greed surrounding him even as he trains to be a child pickpocket, but Dickens grants Pip no such immunity. Rather, he is faced immediately with a dilemma: He must steal for Magwitch or meet physical harm, and by choosing the former option he confirms his place, however unwilling, in the Darwinian scheme of survival of the fittest.

Yet during this grim opening episode, a spark of humor burrows its way into the narrative, setting the stage for similar comic interludes throughout the novel. Much of this effect has to do with Pip’s presence as an adult narrator recalling his youthful self. For even as he recounts the most frightening night of his childhood, the night when he must raid his formidable sister’s larder on behalf of an even more formidable criminal, the language of a more mature, more knowing Pip—one with a large vocabulary, a knack for turning a phrase, and a clear appreciation of physical humor—governs the description. It is hard not to laugh at the spectacle of young Pip hurriedly stuffing his hunk of bread down his pants leg, saving it to stave off the convict’s hunger and risking his sister’s wrath in the process, then trying manfully to complete his evening chores while keeping the bread from slipping out at his ankle. The older Pip is able not only to describe him with mirth, but also to articulate what that hunk of bread might symbolize: Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great punishment (p. 12). The literal hunk of bread so troubling to Pip is made figurative by the narrative voice, which mediates the child’s simple worldview by assigning meaning to its various images. Thus the act of narration incorporates the act of interpretation, for Pip bolsters his description of those concrete things that troubled him as a child with analyses of what they might represent. In choosing a first-person narrator, Dickens brings to the foreground the constant duality of action and interpretation; we are shown an event, and we are shown what it signifies. Our reading of Pip will always be determined, at least in part, by Pip’s reading of himself.

Because of this gap between his older and younger selves, Pip’s narrative is infused throughout with a deep sense of nostalgia. Dickens has often been heralded for his ability to convey childhood convincingly, especially in an era when for many (including Dickens himself), childhood was a fraught and difficult period. But in Great Expectations we are always aware that childhood—even at its most terrifying—is a precious thing lost, something seen from a distance rather than inhabited again. And so we find Pip in his narrative mode lingering on moments in the past, adding commentary from the present, mixing recollection with a tender regret. More often than not, these moments involve Joe Gargery, for whom the adult Pip bears an affection that his more callous and conflicted youthful self could not appreciate. Here is Pip describing his efforts to pass on to Joe the benefit of the reading lessons he receives from Biddy:

Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe. This statement sounds so well, that I cannot in my conscience let it pass unexplained. I wanted to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my society and less open to Estella’s reproach.... I never knew Joe to remember anything from one Sunday to another, or to acquire, under my tuition, any piece of information whatever. Yet he would smoke his pipe at the Battery with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else—even with a learned air—as if he considered himself to be advancing immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did. (pp. 105-106)

Both Pips appear in this passage: the one who, as a youth, grew ashamed of his ungenteel background and blamed the blacksmith for it; the other who, having learned the benefit of Joe’s steadfast nature, wishes him well in retrospect.

This pervasive retrospective gaze is a quality shared by many first-person narratives, but in a novel about expectations it takes on a particularly poignant air. Pip’s eagerness to embrace his Expectations—the package deal designed by a secret benefactor to set him up as a London gentleman—goes hand in hand with his eagerness to shed the blacksmith’s apprenticeship and country connections that he feels have kept him down in the world. To look back, once he has magically obtained the means to go forward, would be to acknowledge his origins—the very act from which his expectations are to free him. Pip’s frequent backward glances in narrative mode thus highlight a tension central to Dickens’s plot. What these great expectations ultimately do, as the plot unfolds, is to send Pip right back to his story’s beginning, to the stolen file and pork pie that bind his fate to that of a convict. All Pip’s hopes for the future lead him straight to his past.

Our sense of the futility of Pip’s expectations is heightened by their very arbitrariness. Pip differs from many of his Victorian orphan counterparts in that his parents are comfortably accounted for from the outset. If there were any substantial inheritance headed Pip’s way—any missing rich uncle (à la Jane Eyre) or benevolent family friend (à la Oliver Twist)— those persons would certainly have stepped forward by now to claim him. Pip’s past, the reader assumes, is not a question open to debate. We read the details of his genealogy, along with the shivering boy, on the Pirrip family tombstones. And though his parents are indeed dead, Pip is not from a material point of view so badly off as many of his peers in Victorian fiction. Mrs. Joe may torture him regularly with Tar water and Tickler, but at least Joe is on hand to comfort him with extra helpings of gravy. If there is a flaw in the story of Pip’s childhood, as far as romance goes, it is precisely that there is no mystery about it. Pip recognizes that deficiency himself; it causes him to shamelessly exaggerate the events of the first day he spends at Miss Havisham’s to his increasingly astounded audience of Joe, Mrs. Joe, and Pumblechook. When the Expectations magically appear, complete with unidentified benefactor and strange conditions of acceptance (among them the stipulation that Pip must officially retain his childhood nickname, which ensures he will stay in some form at least that little shivering boy in the graveyard), they supply the mystery that seems—thanks in part to Dickens’s own efforts—requisite to a Victorian plot. It is not surprising, then, that not only do the expectations become the central occupation of Pip’s life, but they also entice the reader to associate Pip alone with the book’s title and its revelations. Expectations become a form of property, over which Pip can feel himself master—as if there were a finite amount to go around and he had got them all.

But of course Pip’s expectations, literalized though they are in a list of conditions and bequests, exist in the context of countless expectations held by the characters around him—more amorphous expectations in some cases, but articulated quite clearly in others. The Pockets (Matthew and Herbert aside) have expectations of inheriting Miss Havisham’s fortune. Miss Havisham expects Estella to exact her melodramatic revenge on the male sex. Magwitch expects to make Pip an English gentleman and earn his affection in so doing. Herbert expects that by vigorous bouts of looking about him at the office, he will someday make his fortune. To assume that the novel’s great expectations are Pip’s alone is to fall into the same trap Pip falls into when he assigns to Miss Havisham and Estella roles in his future fulfillment—his logic being that, if these characters are here, it must be because they have something to do with him. Thus Dickens, whose plots have frequently been argued to rely unrealistically and excessively on coincidence (even his staunch admirer and fellow novelist George Gissing notes that Dickens displayed astonishing lack of skill when it came to inventing plausible circumstances), plays coincidence against his hero, punishing Pip for assuming that Miss Havisham, who looks and acts like his benefactor, is his benefactor. Once the patron’s true identity is revealed, Pip must redraw his expectations to such a great extent that he cannot hold his position at the center of the narrative. The story that unfolds in Great Expectations is, to his and our surprise, not really about Pip at all.

Pip’s hope that Estella will prove part of the package places him yet more firmly in the position of embodying the views of the reader, who—based on the experience of reading nineteenth-century novels—expects precisely the same thing. The tradition of the marriage plot was established most famously by Jane Austen’s novels early in the nineteenth century: Her works bring together some man and some woman of suitably matched temperament in felicitous union. (That is not all her novels do, by any means, but it is their main impetus.) With good and bad marriages alike, the reader senses that each character seems to get what he or she deserves. Dickens acknowledges that manner of resolution, but he enlarges its scope—and thus the scope of the novel—to include the entire family, not just man and wife. His plots are family plots. Writing at a time when child welfare was of increasing interest to the lawmakers and citizens of England (because metaphorically speaking, a healthy English family meant a healthy English state) and when Poor Laws split up families according to each individual’s earning power with tragic results (as happens in Oliver Twist), Dickens shows us in his novels and stories every imaginable example of parenting, every imaginable child, and in best-case scenarios he comes up, as Austen does, with a match. In Great Expectations, Pip’s sense of individual destiny, centered on himself, must necessarily sacrifice itself to the tale of the collective fate of a family. Pip gains agency not in a journey of self-discovery, but in the process of discovering Magwitch’s estranged wife and stolen child. The final reunion of Estella and Pip, though ostensibly a happy ending, pales in dramatic import and effect when compared to the reunion of Magwitch with his adoptive son, or Pip’s revelation to Magwitch of the fate of his long-lost daughter. Likewise, Joe and Biddy’s marriage, so abruptly revealed, takes its ultimate significance from its product: little Pip. Great Expectations—like Oliver Twist and Bleak House before it—is a family novel, and in that sense, Dickens’s original ending (see "The Original Ending to Great Expectations," p. 467) seems much more to the purpose, for it highlights the novel’s next generation: Young Pip is mistaken by Estella for Pip’s own son, and the resolution between the elder characters comes through the kiss Estella gives the boy—a kiss that calls to mind the one she granted Pip long ago at Satis House. It takes the presence of the child to bring their relationship full circle.

In providing models of families, parents in particular, Dickens is at his most dexterous. The first parents we encounter in Great Expectations are dead ones, and the more we see of live parents in the novel, the more we wonder whether these dearly departed have done their children a favor. Joe, though childlike in his ability to love unconditionally (and oversentimentalized by Pip and Dickens alike), is a good friend to Pip, especially when it comes to letting him go, leading us to speculate whether a lack of biological ties might not be best when parenting is involved. Mrs. Joe, the sibling as default parent, brings Pip up by hand—sparing no rod—while in the Pocket family, siblings act as de facto parents: Mrs. Pocket’s children tumble up haphazardly, the younger ones turning (quite wisely) to older sister Jane instead of their ineffectual mother. Miss Havisham’s outward maturity (in her decaying gown and yellowed hair she is age incarnate) masks a stunted growth marked by deep bitterness of spirit; her obsessive devotion to Estella is clearly a poor substitute for actual nurturing. As for Magwitch, he grow’d up took up (p. 334), as he explains to Pip—that is, he was in and out of prisons from an early age. Yet criminal record aside, Magwitch is undeniably a hard worker and a good provider, and as long as he remained safely at a distance, Pip could hardly have asked for better.

And if Pip does not get Estella—or gets her imperfectly, only after she has thrown herself away on Bentley Drummle and Dickens has thrown away his original ending—then we must remember that our expectation of finding marital bliss at the end of a novel does not go unfulfilled. Wemmick, at his casually charming best, marries his Miss Skiffins; the steadfast Herbert successfully woos Clara Barley; and Joe finds happiness (and possibly more surprising, literacy) with the faithful Biddy. Again, Dickens finds a way to deflect our expectations from his narrator, directing us instead toward characters who seem marginalized by Pip’s version of his plot, but who in fact harbor many of the virtues the novel’s hero conspicuously lacks and reap their rewards in turn.

In their 1970 study of Dickens’s work, influential British critics F. R. and Q. D. Leavis argue that Dickens’s plots comprise series of parallel or comparable events, both among and within his novels, that illuminate his broader themes. Pip’s actions, therefore, must be contrasted with those of his fellow characters, who often find themselves in similar situations to which they react in very different ways. This exercise can operate among many of Dickens’s novels—critics have noted provocative similarities, for example, between Pip and the first-person narrator of Bleak House, Esther Summerson, who as an illegitimate child also carries a burden of shame and guilt with her from her early years—but for our purposes there is plenty to examine within Great Expectations itself. Take the recurring issue of social expectations—in the form of etiquette. At the beginning of the novel, Pip devotes a paragraph to describing Magwitch’s desperate manner of eating, likening him derisively to a large dog of ours (p. 19). At Miss Havisham‘s, however, it is Pip who is made to resemble an animal; he says of Estella that she serves him his meal as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry—I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart—God knows what its name was—that tears started to my eyes (p. 60). Once Pip has moved to London, aware that his manners are countrified at best, he asks the affable Herbert (who has already given him a more gentlemanly nickname) to correct him at the table, a request that results in one of the novel’s most entertaining exchanges:

We had made some progress in the dinner, when I reminded Herbert of his promise to tell me about Miss Havisham.

True, he replied. I’ll redeem it at once. Let me introduce the topic, Handel, by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to put the knife in the mouth—for fear of accidents—and that while the fork is reserved for that use, it is not put further in than necessary. It is scarcely worth mentioning, only it’s as well to do as other people do. Also, the spoon is not generally used over-hand, but under. This has two advantages. You get at your mouth better (which after all is the object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on the part of the right elbow.

He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we both laughed and I scarcely blushed. (p. 171 )

Pip’s offenses continue apace (he turns his glass upside-down on his nose, then attempts to stuff his napkin into it), and we can only imagine what an uncouth picture he must look. But Herbert’s gentle nature—unspoiled, as we soon learn, by false hopes of patronage—allows him to assist Pip without causing hurt or humiliation. That is exactly what Pip cannot do for Joe, who, when he comes to London, drives Pip to distraction by first hanging tenaciously onto his hat, then placing it precariously on the mantel, from which it proceeds to fall periodically through his visit. (The narrator, after mulling over Joe’s obvious discomfort, admits, I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me [p. 214].) Nor can he do it for Magwitch. When the latter arrives unannounced and unwanted from Australia, Pip can only comment again that as he turned his food in his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog (p. 318). In short, though he continues to be pained by the condescension Estella shows him, Pip seems determined to replicate it at the expense of those who care most for him. Herbert’s social ease throws Pip’s unease into relief, showing us by example what Pip must struggle to learn.

By virtue of his expectations, Pip is not designed for any profession (p. 188), which further puts him out of step with his fellow characters, removing him wholly from the novel’s provocative depiction of the world of employment. The topic of labor provides Dickens with a palette for both psychological and physical humor, and the more cheerless Pip grows as narrator, the more fun is to be found in the schizophrenic antics of his acquaintances at work and play. Wemmick is a person split irrevocably in two by labor—the cold clerk in Jaggers’s office bears virtually no resemblance to the friendly lord of Walworth Castle, and the two beings are separated irreconcilably by a morning and evening commute. But once readers have distilled Wemmick’s Walworth self—his true self, we are encouraged to believe—we find him laudably grounded, possessing two commodities quite rare in Dickens’s world: a contented parent and, by novel’s end, a suitable bride, with the promise of a future generation of Wemmicks. Likewise, Herbert’s work self is so divorced from his leisure personality that Dickens never shows us Herbert at the office—though we know that Pip goes to visit him occasionally. But like Wemmick, Herbert in the sanctity of his home exudes ease and camaraderie. Joe Gargery, on the other hand, is so comfortable in his working clothes that he looks artificial when he is out of them, masquerading around town in his stiff Sunday best to Pip’s undying mortification. And Magwitch, who works his way from transport to freeman in New South Wales, makes his manual toil into one extended gesture of generosity, putting away every penny that he might give it to Pip, that Pip might become a gentleman and never have to lift a finger.

Magwitch’s determination to make Pip a man of leisure, his revenge on the stratified English society that kept him low, feeds the novel’s temporal tensions, for it too seems like a backward move. The nineteenth century in England, after all, is the age of industrialization and labor, and Pip’s expectations, though ostensibly forward-looking, exclude him from it completely. Dickens had considered the term self-made man in his fiction before (he used it in Hard Times, to describe what Mr. Bounderby is not); here he fashions Pip into a man-made man, with Magwitch at the controls. Pip is the product of Magwitch’s labor. It is thus fitting that, once the convict is out of the picture, Pip should earn redemption (and pay off his debts) by learning to labor himself, and that he should do it for Herbert, whose entry into a business partnership Pip has surreptitiously funded, first with Magwitch’s money, then with Miss Havisham’s.

Pip’s paying off of debts represents a final settling of accounts on a larger scale, a kind of literary calculus or summing up of the score that characterizes the end of so many Victorian novels. It consists of the responses to a set of rather cold-blooded questions: Who marries? Who dies? Who inherits? Where does the money go? What happens to the property? Who, in short, is rewarded, and who punished? Pip, Estella, and Herbert are the young generation at Great Expectations’s beginning, and frankly, the prospects for this trio look grim; it is no accident that on the opening page, five out of six of the children we encounter are already dead. By the novel’s end, new marriages have taken place, creating new potential parents, and a new generation (embodied in a second Pip, no less) has arrived on the scene. What do England and its colonies hold in store for these parents and children? How will they live? What are their expectations? The power of this novel is that in literalizing a set of hopes for its protagonist, enumerating his expectations, it brings these questions to the fore, making them the focus of the story even as it elbows Pip off to the sidelines. From the moment when Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe speculate that Miss Havisham will make Pip’s fortune, to Wemmick’s constant reminders in favor of securing portable property, to Pip’s realization that where his benefactor goes, so go his assets, we are encouraged to follow the money trail. In so doing, we imitate not Pip but Jaggers, who makes no assumptions but operates solely on the basis of evidence. In this light, Great Expectations acts as a kind of object lesson to its readers, exhorting them to observe carefully and jump to no conclusions—especially when being baited by the likes of Dickens. Pip learns this lesson once he has turned from his own affairs to those of Magwitch, when he finds himself a different role in the story: no longer its subject, but its author. Thus his most triumphant moment in the entire novel is his revelation to Jaggers of Magwitch’s connection to Estella, when he presents Jaggers with a piece of information the all-knowing lawyer lacked—in other words, when he assumes the powerful position of storyteller. Pip may be childless at the end of the novel, but in piecing together the puzzle of Magwitch’s past, he shows himself able to generate a story—and, more important, a family.

As for Dickens, who gave life to so many fictional families, he has proved himself able to generate a whole world. Dickens’s nineteenth-century England is ours. His plucky orphans and angelic maidens, jolly bachelors and eccentric spinsters, child pickpockets and criminals in the dock, Scrooges and Tiny Tims—these are our Victorians; we recognize them when we see them. His scenery—the prisons, orphanages, streets, the London particular (the dense fog peculiar to the English capital in the century of industrialization), the small English towns whose roads lead to the big city: These set our Victorian stage. His plots of long-lost children reunited with long-lost parents, missing wills and seemingly magical inheritances, identities concealed and revealed on sentimental deathbeds, are the plots we now associate with the English novel at the height of its powers, and no one has done them better. Within twenty years of Dickens’s death his name began to appear in adjective forms, Dickensian or Dickensy, describing both the good and the bad of the world he depicted—both the festive roadside inn, for example, and the brutal conditions of the poorhouse, a fresh Christmas snowfall and a bleak November drizzle. More than any nineteenth-century writer, Dickens can embody the figure of the novelist itself. It is hard to imagine a time when novels were not considered a viable literary genre, but we now recognize Dickens as one of the writers who made them so.

Dickens was also one of the first writers—if not the first—to marry literary ambition with the desire to entertain a mass audience, attempting a union of what we now call high and low culture that to this day eludes most authors who aspire to it. In fact, Dickens’s legendary middle-class appeal kept literary critics away from his work for decades in the early twentieth century, during the time when to be a serious writer in the manner of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf was to produce difficult texts that baffled readers instead of inviting them in. Next to these figures, Dickens seemed hopelessly unintellectual—damned in the words of F. R. Leavis as a mere entertainer and pointedly omitted from his mid-century survey of three seminal novelists, The Great Tradition (George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad were the lucky chosen). A few lone voices praised his works—writers like G. K. Chesterton and George Gissing among them. By the mid-twentieth century, George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell had weighed in on Dickens’s behalf as well. And by the centenary of his death, in 1970, the tables had turned completely. A collection of essays appeared praising Dickens as both artist and social critic, featuring contributions from such prominent voices as Raymond Williams. The Leavises—exuberantly correcting past wrongs—published a critical overview, Dickens the Novelist, whose stated purpose was to establish beyond any doubt Dickens’s status as one of the greatest of creative writers (p. ix). It is important (if obvious) to remember that the novels had not changed in that time. Rather, what readers found to value in them had.

It is also important to note that, collectively, tastes concerning Dickens’s oeuvre had shifted. No longer were readers attracted chiefly to the comic, rambling anecdotes comprising such early works as Pickwick Papers. It was the later novels, with their tightly controlled plots, pervasive social critiques, and ironic narrative voices, that seemed more relevant—possibly because they more closely resembled, in the last aspect at least, the modernist novels that in the early part of the twentieth century came to embody aesthetic value. Great Expectations, which most of its contemporary reviewers agreed contained some of Dickens’s best writing and characterization (Forster, for example, voiced high praise for Jaggers and Wemmick) and which combined the comedic strengths of his early works with the gravity of his mature novels, now appears especially appropriate to represent the Dickens canon. It is less sentimental than David Copperfield, though not less engaging; its plot less tangled than that of Bleak House or Little Dorrit, though no less intriguing. As Chesterton remarked in an essay, its title might have done for any of Dickens’s works: The concept of great expectations underlies them all. But in most of Dickens’s works, Chesterton notes, those expectations are rewarded; they cater to a more sentimental readership. Great Expectations, on the other hand, might be said to reward the modern sensibility by the very act of withholding certain kinds of satisfaction. It wins over readers by acknowledging the narrative value of disappointed expectations.

Radhika Jones is the managing editior of Grand Street magazine, a freelance writer, and a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

CHAPTER I

MY FATHER’S FAMILY NAME being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father’s family name on the authority of his tombstone and my sister—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs),¹ my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father‘s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, Also Georgiana Wife of the Above, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine—who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle—I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.a My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place, overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark, flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes, and mounds, and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low, leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

Hold your noise! cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

O! Don’t cut my throat, sir, I pleaded in terror. Pray don’t do it, sir.

Tell us your name! said the man. Quick!

Pip, sir.

Once more, said the man, staring at me. Give it mouth!

Pip. Pip, sir.

Show us where you live, said the man. Point out the place!

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the alder trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside-down, and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself—for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet—when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously.

You young dog, said the man, licking his lips, what fat cheeks you ha’ got.

I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my years, and not strong.

Darn Me if I couldn’t eat ‘em, said the man, with a threatening shake of his head, and if I han’t half a mind to’t!

I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn‘t, and held tighter to the tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it; partly, to keep myself from crying.

Now lookee here! said the man. Where’s your mother?

There, sir! said I.

He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.

There, sir! I timidly explained. Also Georgiana. That’s my mother.

Oh! said he, coming back. And is that your father alonger your mother?

Yes sir, said I; him too; late of this parish.

Ha! he muttered then, considering. Who d‘ye live with—sup posin’ you’re kindly let to live, which I han’t made up my mind about?

My sister, sir—Mrs. Joe Gargery—wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir.

Blacksmith, eh? said he. And looked down at his leg.

After darkly looking at his leg and at me several times, he came closer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his.

Now lookee here, he said, the question being whether you’re to be let to live. You know what a file is?

Yes, sir.

And you know what wittles is?b

Yes, sir.

After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a greater sense of helplessness and danger.

You get me a file. He tilted me again. And you get me wittles. He tilted me again. You bring ‘em both to me. He tilted me again. Or I’ll have your heart and liver out. He tilted me again.

I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both hands, and said, If you would kindly please to let me keep upright, sir, perhaps I shouldn’t be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.

He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped over its own weather-cock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:

You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any particular, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain’t alone, as you may think I am. There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. I am keeping that young man from harming of you at the present moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?

I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery,c early in the morning.

Say Lord strike you dead if you don‘t! said the man.

I said so, and he took me down.

Now, he pursued, you remember what you’ve undertook, and you remember that young man, and you get home!

Goo-good night, sir, I faltered.

Much of that! said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. I wish I was a frog. Or a eel!

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms—clasping himself, as if to hold himself together—and limped towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.

When he came to the low church wall he got over it, like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy or the tide was in.

The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered—like an unhooped cask upon a pole—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all round for the horrible young man, and could seen no signs of him. But, now I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.

CHAPTER II

MY SISTER, MRS. JOE Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up by hand. Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow—a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it at all, or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day of her life.

Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the dwellings in our country were—most of them, at that time. When I ran home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment I raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it, sitting in the chimney corner.

Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she’s out now, making it a baker’s dozen.

Is she?

Yes, Pip, said Joe; and what’s worse, she’s got Tickler with her.

At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame.

She sot down, said Joe, and she got up, and she made a grab at Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That’s what she did, said Joe, slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at it: she Ram-paged out, Pip.

Has she been gone long, Joe? I always treated him as a larger species of child, and as no more than my equal.

Well, said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock,d she’s been on the Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She’s a coming! Get behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towele betwixt you.

I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing me—I often served her as a connubial missile—at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his great leg.

Where have you been, you young monkey? said Mrs. Joe, stamping her foot. Tell me directly what you’ve been doing to wear me away with fret and fright and worrit, or I’d have you out of that corner if you was fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys.

I have only been to the churchyard, said I, from my stool, crying and rubbing myself.

Churchyard! repeated my sister. If it warn’t for me you’d have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?

You did, said I.

And why did I do it, I should like to know! exclaimed my sister.

I whimpered, I don’t know.

I don‘t! said my sister. I’d never do it again! I know that. I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off, since born you were. It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without being your mother.

My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at the fire. For, the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me in the avenging coals.

Hah! said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. Churchyard, indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two. One of us, by-the-by, had not said it at all. You’ll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days, and oh, a pr-r-recious pair you’d be without me!

As she applied herself to set the tea things, Joe peeped down at me over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that he sat feeling his right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib—where it sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way as if she were making a plaisterf—using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaister, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.

On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joe’s housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread-and-butter down the leg of my trousers.

The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose, I found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water. And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each other’s admiration now and then—which stimulated us to new exertions. To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast-diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my untouched bread-and-butter on the other. At last, I desperately considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the circumstances. I took advantage of the moment when Joe had just looked at me, and got my bread-and-butter down my leg.

Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he didn’t seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw that my bread-and-butter was gone.

Reviews for Great Expectations (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[luminous4path · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It was okay. I think its themes are meant more for a YA audience.

[chwiggy · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I did not finish reading this book. It just felt like an eternity every so often. And while I sometimes caught a sliver of enjoyable writing, the premise had never hooked me enough to now keep going. I think I've had enough at least for now.

[connorshirs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I took a buzz-feed quiz on which classic novel I should read and got this. 1) The cover is beautiful. 2) I thought Miss Havisham was a ghost the entire story. I loved Estella the most as a character. She proves that every individual has the ability to love; despite their background. One of my favorites.

[kittycunningh-815148 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Better toward the end than at the beginning. Listening to it through tedium was better than trying to read it for myself.

[profh-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I remember my mother expressing surprise that Dickens wasn't read in any of my college English classes. I can't think of a single graduate student in or around my cohort who worked on him either, yet I knew he was one of my grandfather's favorites and that Dickens was very popular in his day. In sum, I think this is a fairytale style of prose that's gone out of fashion (and for good reason). Everyone in the novel is an exaggerated caricature. It makes for very predictable dialogue and a static, boring plotline. There's an interesting central idea: Does the source of wealth matter and does money change a person? The examination of this question is fairly surface level for a work of nearly five-hundred pages. I'm content to have had the experience of reading one of his more famous novels, but I would only recommend Dickens to someone interested in that particular time/place in the history of England and English Literature.

[composingcomposer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took longer to get invested in than some of Dickens's other works, but by the end I did care what happened to the various characters.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A sensible chuckle. I was surprised to see how little humour has changed and how old the "old jokes" really are. Poor Pip, forever blueballed.

[elenchus_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Recognisably Dickensian in all the ways I remembered, perhaps 30 years after my first Dickens novels. I was not bowled over the way I was in freshman seminar, but well-enough pleased and the specific title was decided by R's school assignment so I'm content with that, too. Great Expectations points up Dickens's clear-eyed insight into the hearts of neglected if not destroyed children. I broadly recall a similar outlook in other novels, and it may not even be particularly manifest here. That deep psychology into other people (people different than me, and yet recognisable) registered then and now as a key characteristic of the modern novel.No doubt influenced by my reading in noir, I found in the central plot a mystery without a sleuth; Dickens's own asides the same role as the shamus's distracting tough talk in Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald.The fact that every character is in the end found to be connected to all others (Six Degrees of Pip Pirrip), amused me and more or less was expected, but R found it almost infuriating. Great Expectations has a clearer message than I recall from Bleak House or Little Dorrit, as though Dickens imagined characters and situations as a means to assess the myriad ways Pip might delude himself: class or caste, public acceptance or accolade, wealth or comfort -- all manner of outer appearance, in other words, in contrast with inner meaning. The sheer variety of it all, and the cast of characters with their idiosyncracies, kept it interesting.Uncertain whether I will next re-read one of the three novels from that freshman seminar, or pick another novel. My initial impression 30 years ago stands, Dickens is worth reading.//Favourite characters: Wemmick, Herbert Pocket, Havisham, Jaggers -- and Satis House. (I wonder if Peake thought of it when writing Gormenghast.)

[steve_walker-348810 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Not my cup of tea.

[veritythefox · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the best novels ever written.

[felixfern · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Required reading for being a human. Also it's epic.

[tehya13 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Although lengthy, this book was hard to put down. Amazing characters all with unique personality and plot twists I didn't see coming. This book had a lot of humor in it surprisingly! And it had me laughing for 5 minutes straight. Pip living through hardship and experiencing family deaths at such a young age is bound to get someone down. But it never did get him down. He was a hard worker and always polite to his surroundings. Although he despised Mr. Pumblechook's claims of raising Pip up to the man he is today, he never snapped or said wrong things to him. His sister did more works in his life than he ever thought she did, she taught him well and he starts to realize it towards the end. (God rest Mrs. Joe Gargery's soul.) The ending is bittersweet yet happy. Turning over a new leaf at the end. I loved this book more than I thought I would and I'm happy I experienced it after years of it sitting on my shelf. (also my favorite character was Herbert, he's such a nice boy.)

[nx74defiant · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bit slow in parts. Since it was originally published in installments it has peaks and valleys. It pay better to have the story be longer. The ending is fitting

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Charles Dickens' classic of unrequited love, and failures of communication. Pip grows up without an understanding of where his situation in Victorian england comes from, and later suffers in his quest for understanding who he really is. A tearjerker by modrn standards, and certainly lacks the fairy tale ending that dickens must have tired of by 1861.

[steller0707 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Second time reading this - the first was in high school. First published as a serial in a magazine, I can see how it would have been very popular. It has a little bit of everything in it - adventure, crime, coming-of-age, love gothic and humor!

[stevenjohntait · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book. "You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose..." Perfect. I think I've read it four times, but I'm sure I'll read it again.

[gilroy_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This could be listed with the subtitle of "The Misadventures of Pip." It's interesting, though not something that caught me to focus on it.If I'm understanding this correctly, Joe was abused by an alcoholic father and as such married an abusive woman to take the place of the abusive father. This is not openly displayed in the text, per se, but it is discussed by the narrator on a few occasions. This felt like a book written and published in stages, so the various parts feel a little stilted when pushed together. Though to bring the file up again did connect them some. Also the whole deal with the dying of Ms. Havernsham is kinda creepy.Something I did have to keep correcting myself in my mind was that the use of certain words has changed mightily since this was written. When someone asks is he an intimate, this isn't referring to a date, but to a close friend, for instance.I noted that unless he's given them no first name, Dickens has a habit of referring to characters by their title and first name. Mr. and Mrs. Joe. Mr. and Ms. Cecelia. It's a touch unnerving.I've gotten just about past the half way point. My loan expires tomorrow. I'm not looking to renew. The story isn't real compelling to me, and the "Great Expectations" are two fold: what Pip expects of himself and what others expect of Pip. This is definitely a long winded fictional biography. I'm not into biographies most times. Might be why this isn't my type of book.

[threadnsong · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm quite impressed with this book, read for a F2F book group. By this point in Dickens' writing career, he is less intrigued with cartoonish, humorous caricatures of people and more involved in the depth of their personalities. Joe, the simple but loving blacksmith who is unhappily married to Pip's sister, Estelle, and Miss Havisham have all finally received reasons and intrigue and a backstory to explain themselves.The basic story is a tale of an orphaned boy who lives with his b*tch of a sister and her husband near the marshes of Kent. He stumbles upon an escaped fugitive one night who terrifies him and colors his childhood for many years. Time passes, schooling might start (or not), and Pip meets the odd Miss Havisham who lives on abandoned home and brewery with her ward, Estelle. Pip spends almost as much time there as at school, and events at home include his sister and her alliance with narrow-minded townsfolk.As Pip grows older, his heart remains compassionate towards Joe, towards Estelle, and towards the strange Herbert, despite Pip's abuse at his sister's hands. She is beaten during a robbery and left without an ability to speak, while Pip is sent off to London to claim his inheritance. What gives this book its depth is that Pip has "great expectations" about where his new-found fortune originates, how much more richly he can live, and yet nothing becomes as it seems. Herbert and he become fast friends; Herbert knows the backstory for Miss Havisham; Pip's personal lawyer, Mr. Wemmick is a different person at home and at the office; and finally Pip's personal benefactor becomes a central character.Definitely one of Dickens' best writings, and worth the time put into it.

[isatyajeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Speechless...!

[comfypants · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A poor boy is promised to inherit a fortune.4/4 (Great).Pip is usually unsympathetic, but there are enough lovable secondary characters, and enough twists and suspense, to keep the book enjoyable, and to make a lasting impression.

[booksfordinner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What on earth can you say? Pip!

[nittnut · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is classic Dickens. I know he uses a lot of words, but he tells tales of the human condition with such humor and compassion. My favorite characters were Joe Gargery and Wemmick. Wemmick was particularly endearing with his "aged P" and his life away from work. So glad I persevered and finished it.

[justagirlwithabook · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is another one of my favorites of Dickens'! I have no clue when I read this one but the whole story of Pip really touched me. There were moments I thought he was a fool, but the vast majority of the time I really empathized with him. It's another classic example of Dickens' atmospheric style and wit coming together for an altogether great novel.

[deckla_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Who can resist Pip and Miss Haversham and Joe and Estella and the motley crew of characters that make up this extraordinary novel.

[csdaley-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As I slowly work my way through Charles Dickens for the second time in my life (I was 13 when I worked my way through the first time) I am impressed at how well I still like the books. This one isn't my favorite. It is slow at times. This was the only flaw for me. Dickens captures me. There is something about his writing that transports me to a gray and sooty London. I am not sure which one I read next but this book has done nothing to slow down my desire to reread them all.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dickens' descriptions of locations, people and their characters (or lack of it) create a mellow reading experience.They make the plot, at times revolving around Bonkers Chicken predictable twists with a few delightful surprises, more memorable and enduring.His description of Pip's early encounters with the alphabet and numbers is a treasure:"...I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush...""After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition."Though not as compelling as A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Great Expectations offers fewerannoying personages than his other books and Joe, Wemmick, Herbert, and the Aged givereaders people to care about. Pip and his convict are more of a challenge.

[amerynth · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I have liked all of the other books by Charles Dickens that I've read, but boy, I found "Great Expectations" extremely dull. This is the first time I found his work so wordy that it seemed like he was stretching things out to make his serial money add up or something.It's funny because a lot happens in this book, but it felt like the plot just wasn't moving -- perhaps I didn't like Pip, who rises to great fortune and then suffers the obvious fall, as the sole narrator. Glad to be done with this one (finally.)

[ajbraithwaite_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I can't believe it's taken me this long to get round to reading this book. Very glad I did. Not such a huge cast of characters as some of Dicken's other books, which made it a relatively quick read. Enjoyed everything except the very end of it - and was then intrigued to read in the Appendix that it wasn't how Dickens had originally planned it to go. I think he should have stuck to his first plan.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've discovered that listening to Dickens in the car is actually a reasonable way to get through a big old book. Maybe something about listening to it in chunks reflects the original publication in episodes. This has the usual cast of thousands (I may exaggerate, but not by much!) and they are a varied lot. Pip is the hub of the story and it starts with his meeting Magwich in the churchyard as a young boy. He helps the convict with food, but then gets involved in the chase to catch him again. It's an important meeting that has echoes through the rest of Pip's young life. In an unconnected event, Pip gets invited to Miss Haversham's and meets Estella. This is a very odd setup (understatement). In the short term it gives Pip some heartache and ideas above his station. This, again, has repercussions through the story and is a source of some considerable upheaval. Pip becomes Joe's apprentice, but his ideas of being a gentleman and winning Estella blind him to both Joe's goodness and the charms and affection of Biddy. He, in fact, turns into a snob and acts quite badly in this phase. Then comes the big turning point, Pip comes into his Great Expectations. The assumption is that the expectations are from Miss Haversham, certainly that's what everyone seems to think. And Pip becomes even worse. He goes to town and sets up an expensive establishment with Herbert, who is a Haversham relation of some description. They live a bit too high and end up in debt quite a lot. Pip neglects Joe in this period and gets a nice superiority complex going. Then the crisis comes, when Pip discovers who his benefactor is and it's not who you thought. That sets Pip & Herbert off on a bit of a madcap trip, in which they try and get a convict out of the country without being caught. Herbert turns up trumps in this phase, having seemed a bit weak and easily lead until this point. It doesn't turn out well, and Pip looses everything. It is at this point that Joe, once more, does the decent thing and turns up to sort Pip out once more. Not that he deserves it. And he then misses his chance to actually be nice to Joe for once and acknowledge what he owes to him. The ending comes upon you quite abruptly, and is slightly disatisfying. I know it was originally set that pip returned, found Estella, but that she had remarried. In this version, she is not yet married and there is a possibility that they will finally get together. Only I'm not entirely sure that is a good idea. Thy have both changed, with Estella having come down off her high horse and Pip having learnt stability and hard work since they were children. I'm just not convinced the possibly happy ending is justified. I felt, as I often do with Dickens, that he spends 2/3 of the book setting it up and then crams the final third with all the story. It works though, and the pace sits will with the episodic listening.

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am giving this audiobook edition 4* but downgrading my rating for the book itself to 3 ½ stars. I found Pip's devotion to Estella romantic but unconvincing and Pip himself I don't care for very much. This is my third or fourth time reading this novel and I keep hoping that I will discover why so many people think it is Dickens greatest. I like David Copperfield so much that I guess I just wish to feel the same fondness for this... Oh well.