Paperback, 530 pages
English language
Published Dec. 30, 1998 by Oxford University Press.
Great Expectations charts the progress of Pip from childhood through often painful experiences to adulthood, as he moves from the Kent marshes to busy, commercial London, encountering a variety of extraordinary characters ranging from Magwitch, the escaped convict, to Miss Havisham, locked up with her unhappy past and living with her ward, the arrogant, beautiful Estella.
Pip must discover his true self, and his own set of values and priorities. Whether such values allow one to prosper in the complex world of early Victorian England is the major question posed by Great Fxpectations, one of Dickens's most fascinating, and disturbing, novels.
This edition includes the original, discarded ending, Dickens's brief working notes, and the serial instalments and chapter divisions in different editions. It also uses the definitive Clarendon text.
I enjoyed this novel more than I expected. Dickens writes very impressively, which maybe should not be a surprise but I imagined something more formal and tedious. He writes with a rhythm and some amazing turns of phrases. I am unfamiliar with the speech of the time to understand how much of what seems novel to me is merely the idiom of the time.
