Product Description

'you are to understand, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret...' Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past - the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella - and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart. A powerful and moving novel, Great Expectations is suffused with Dickens's memories of the past and its grip on the present, and it raises disturbing questions about the extent to which individuals affect each other's lives. This edition includes a lively introduction, Dickens's working notes, the novel's original ending, and an extract from an early theatrical adaptation. It reprints the definitive Clarendon text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9366 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Customer Reviews

The one to read if you DO NOT like Charles Dickens
Many people will have come across Charles Dickens as a school text which one was compelled to read. Perhaps, like me, they were too young to recognise the subtlety, complexity and ironic humour that pervade Dickens's novels. It is worth trying again!

`Great Expectations' is a classic example of the realist novel, i.e. a novel which we know to be fiction but which we nevertheless expect to be representative of real life. In essence it is a life story of a child, Pip, from a very working class background in Kent, and his social ladder climbing that results from his inheritance of considerable sums of money from an unknown benefactor; it is told as memories recalled by an adult Pip. Dickens achieves realism right from the very first paragraph by telling us how Pip came by his name, details of the location and geography, describing people's jobs etc and describing his now dead relatives by referring to headstone inscriptions in a churchyard. The gloomy and menacing imagery of the overgrown graveyard used here, together with the sudden appearance of a gruff and frightening stranger creates sympathy for the child Pip in the mind of the reader. Indeed, one remarkable achievement of the novel is to maintain the reader's sympathy for Pip as he becomes an out-and-out snob simply because he has money. But he is never merely a snob and much of the comedy of the novel is drawn from parodies of the rich exemplified by Pip's superficiality in this respect. Later in the novel it becomes clear that Pip's mystery benefactor was the same convicted criminal that had accosted him in the graveyard at the start of the story - by linking Pip's new gentility with wealth derived from a deported murderer, Dickens's narrative implies that the great achievements of mid-Victorian society were founded on very dark realities indeed.

Dickens planned `Great Expectations' for serial publication in a periodical before it appeared as a novel. So if you do find it more difficult than contemporary fiction (and most do) and wish to read it in bite-sized chunks, then you will in fact be reading it exactly as the author intended. Details of the initial serialisation are provided in an appendix to the Oxford World's Classics version, as are clear and lucid explanatory notes accompanying the text, so vital to the understanding of a work written well over a century ago.

Don't worry about whether you `like' Dickens or not, just read it and enjoy it.

A joy to read
I first read this (actually that should say I was first forced to read this) in school over 20 years ago. I hated it. It was disected to within an inch of its life and I came to dread those lessons with a passion. What a shame that school can manage to put off even the most ardent of readers. Isn't reading supposed to be about enjoyment?

I picked this up a couple of weeks ago out of curiosity and read the first page while standing in the bookshop. Before I knew it I had read the entire first chapter and loved it. There is such humour in Dicken's books that would have been totally wasted on me as a 15 year old.

It took me a few weeks to read (hence the 4 stars as I had to concentrate more than with other books) but I thought it was just wonderful. I remembered so little of the story from the first time around that it was like reading a new book. What a fantastic array of characters I came to know. Just loved it.

Great Expectations
I am studying English Literature BA (Hons) degree at the moment and this is a great way to buy book for my studies. Not too bulky to hold and carry and the price is very good, especially as I have to buy 10 books per course.