Great Expectations
1861
- authors
- benefactors
- bildungsromans
- boys
- british and irish fiction (fictional works by one author)
- child and youth fiction
- classic literature
- coming of age
- conduct of life
- criticism and interpretation
The story
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman; a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
What it’s like
Damp marsh mornings, churchyard mist, and the soot-grey lamplit streets of London give this book its colour, and its voice is a grown man's wry, tender exasperation as he looks back on his younger self. Dickens's prose is dense and theatrical, full of comic grotesques and long rolling sentences that snap shut on a chilling image. The mood moves between the warm, cramped kitchen of a blacksmith's forge and a stale, candle-choked gloom in a decaying mansion where the clocks have stopped. Dread runs steadily underneath: convict hulks on the Thames, chains in the mud, and a few fierce, bloody fights that land with weight but are never lingered on for shock. The emotional register is melancholy and bittersweet, with humour threading through the cruelty. It suits a rainy Sunday with the lamp on, or a slow reread on a long train journey. Its central figure is a proud, confused boy gradually learning what he owes and what actually matters, which rewards readers who love sprawling Victorian fiction, moral reckoning, and characters who linger long after the last page.
More books like Great Expectations
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved Great Expectationsand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
