Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens and Charles Augustus Scott

Book Overview

'Great Expectations is up there for me with the world's greatest novels' Howard Jacobson. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations charts the course of orphan Pip Pirrip's life as it is transformed by a vast, mysterious inheritance. A terrifying encounter with the escaped convict Abel Magwitch in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes;...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0141439564
• ISBN13: 9780141439563
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Great Expectations

the book was so much fun to read, i just loved it. the book should be read by either a mature teen for a english course or an adult. what i lked was the young man learning to grow up and the disliked was the convict.

Fantastic!

Truly one of my all time favorite books. Every person wanting to read classics should read this.

Expectations Met

Great Expectations is truly one of Dickens' best works. It is long but there is so much to offer - rich, memorable characters, universal themes, exciting adventure, unrequited love, murder, mystery, and revenge. The plot touches heavily upon social class distinctions, education, economics and crime and punishment. Issues that still resonate with the modern reader today. Great Expectations, famously, begins in a cemetery where the orphaned Pip is visiting the graves of his parents. There he encounters an escaped convict from a nearby prison ship who is to change his life though Pip will not understand fully how until many years later. As the book continues he meets many surreal characters with perhaps the most memorable being Miss Havisham, the crazed jilted bride, whose manipulations in regard to Pip and her adopted daughter,Estella, break Pip's heart and leave Estella a shallow, empty woman. Another one of Dickens more famous characters appearing in Great Expectations is Pip's guardian, Jaggers, the successful and possibly compulsive obsessive, attorney. Less well known but equally memorable appearances are made by Pip's loyal friend Herbert Pocket whose unusual family provide comic relief and social satire, Pip's brother-in-law the kind but uneducated Joe Gargory, Mrs. Joe, Pip's shrewish sister who is raising Pip "by hand", Jagger's assistant Wemmick who neatly divides his home life and his work life plus a host of others. Life in 19th century England - both London and it's small towns - are masterfully kept alive by Dickens' sure contemporary descriptions.

Best novel EVER!

Another reviewer claims that you have to be at least 21 years old to read this book. Although I don't think it should be "forced" on schoolchildren (they will only hate it) I read this novel when I was a child and I loved it. I have just re-read it now and I enjoy it all the more. This is my favorite novel by Dickens. It is from his later period and is criticized for being too dark - which, however, makes it more perfect for today's sensibilities. Stephen King cites this work as one of his favorites: he believes that it is this book that brought the gothic novel mainstream.Was there ever a novelist who created more memorable characters than Dickens? Here, we meet perhaps his most intriguing - Miss Havisham. For anyone unfamiliar with the story, I will not spoil it by describing her. The story is similar to parable about the prodigal son - good Pip inexplicably comes into some money and goes off to the corrupting city.AN IMPORTANT THING TO NOTE: Dickens wrote two ending for this book. His friends thought that the original ending was too downbeat and they asked him to come up with a different one. It is the upbeat ending that is the official ending of the novel. However, most critics agree that the original unpublished ending is better. Most modern editions feature the unpublished ending in an appendix. MAKE SURE YOU BUY A COPY THAT CONTAINS THE ORIGINAL ENDING!

A True Classic!

I love this book! This is one of my all-time favorite books ever. I had to read it eons ago when I was in ninth grade, and now (14 years later) I am still enjoying it. Every few years I take this one down from my bookshelf to revisit. This is the story of Pip, a small orphaned boy living in poverty in the English countryside with his much older sister and her husband. Pip meets a convict in a graveyard one damp morning and helps him out in the form of some vittles and an iron file. Later in the story, Pip moves from poverty to being a "gentleman" due to the influence of a mysterious, anonymous benefactor. This book tells of his adventures and how Pip's expectations guide him through life. Towards the end of the story, Pip finds out that reality is sometimes very different from what we expect it to be. The characters are what really make this book stand out. Charles Dickens is a master of character development, and his descriptions of Miss Havisham, Wemmick, Joe, and the others is brilliant! The dialogue is great, with the words written the way a commoner would have spoken in England in the 1800's. Another thing I really liked was how all of the characters are inter-related to each other in ways that you may not discover until you get to the end of the novel.This novel will make you laugh and it might make you sad, but it is always entertaining. If you are in high school and reading this book for the first time for English class, keep at it! It may seem difficult at first if you are not used to Dickens, but this book is well worth it! It is truly a gem.

A book everone should read

I chose to write a review of Great Expectations because I wanted to be able to rate a novel "five-stars" without an ounce of hesitation. Context: I'm not by any means some sort of an intellect. Like many people who have read Great Expectations, I was assigned this book in high school. I remember looking to the end of the book, first, to see how many pages there were. I cringed. Then I began to read that first chapter about a boy named Pip who meets the convict looking for vittles. I won't give anything away about the plot. I only want to say that this was the first book that I ever read that I had me truly absorbed. I remember a kid in my class who read ahead a few chapters and had us all in wonder as to what twists transpired. He just smiled and said, "you won't believe how this thing turns out." After reading other Dickens books I realized that his greatest strengths was populating his books with amazing, odd, likeable, and despicable characters who found there way in and out of his stories. If you haven't read this book, do so.