Paperback, 512 pages
English language
Published Dec. 30, 1996 by Penguin Books.
'Pip's expectation, before his expectations, is that he will be shown to have a!ready committed a crime,' writes David Trotter in his Introduction to this new edition. The orphan Pip's terrifying encounter with an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, and his mysterious summons to the house of Miss Havisham and her cold, beautiful ward Estella, form the prelude to his 'great expectations'. How Pip comes into a fortune, what he does with it, and what he discovers through his secret benefactor are the ingredients of his struggle for moral redemption.
Great Expectations was pubiished in three volumes in July 1861. According to Swinburne: 'This was the author's last great work, the defects in it are as nearly imperceptible as spots on the sun or shadows on a sunlit sea.'
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.
