In the Library
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens, 1861
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 59
- Length
- Length 184k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
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.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Dickens's first autobiography of the self, before he learned to make the benefactor a convict.
£1.99
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald writes the American Pip: another man who reinvents himself for a woman who exists only in his imagination.
£1.99
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Twain sends another boy through the same class system, but on a raft instead of in a drawing room.
£1.99
About the book
In a shuttered room where every clock stopped at twenty to nine, a jilted bride sits in her yellowing wedding dress beside a cake gone gray with cobwebs, and a blacksmith's boy is brought in to play for her amusement and to fall hopelessly in love with the girl she is raising to break men's hearts. That boy, Pip, comes into a secret fortune and goes to London to become a gentleman, certain he knows who his benefactor is. He is wrong, and the error costs him nearly everything that ever loved him. What Great Expectations does that no Victorian novel quite matches is to let a man narrate his own snobbery from the inside: the older Pip tells the whole story in retrospect, so every page of his rise carries the aftertaste of his shame at Joe, the gentle blacksmith who loved him without wanting a thing in return. The cruelty of the book is that the hindsight repairs nothing. Pip sees exactly how he failed the man who raised him, and the seeing only sharpens the grief.