Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens(1861)
Novelc. 520 pages
“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.”
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One great work, every day
by Charles Dickens(1861)
“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.”
Charles Dickens(1861)
Pip, a blacksmith's apprentice, receives great expectations from an unknown benefactor and learns that becoming a gentleman means losing everything that mattered. Dickens wrote this as a weekly serial, and the plot has the propulsive energy the form demanded. Miss Havisham in her rotting wedding dress; Estella, cold and beautiful; Magwitch the convict: the images brand themselves. The novel is about class, about gratitude, about the lies we tell ourselves about our own origins. Dickens originally wrote a happy ending, then revised it to ambiguity. The mists rise. What Pip expects is never what he gets.