Great Expectations
Charles Dickens(1861)
Extract
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.
A small boy in the marshes, terrified among the gravestones, feeds a convict and sets in motion a chain of consequence that will take decades to reveal itself. This 1861 novel traces Pip's journey from the Kent forge to London's drawing rooms, where a mysterious benefactor funds the education that will nearly destroy his soul. The comedy is ferocious, the cast immortal: Miss Havisham rotting in her wedding dress, Jaggers washing clients off his hands, Estella trained to break hearts she cannot feel. Yet the deepest subject is shame, the corrosive belief that where one comes from is something to escape. Dickens knew that wound from the inside. Pip must lose everything to learn what was valuable all along.
If you loved this
Dickens's first autobiography of the self, before he learned to make the benefactor a convict.
Fitzgerald writes the American Pip: another man who reinvents himself for a woman who exists only in his imagination.
Twain sends another boy through the same class system, but on a raft instead of in a drawing room.