Las obras clásicas son las -en teoría- más complicadas de leer, y por ende, entender ¿Por qué? Por su alto contenido metafórico y en mi opinión, también por una razón muy simple: los tiempos de aquellos libros son muy diferentes a los nuestros.
La forma de vida, la sociedad, la cultura, la libertad, lo que era bueno y malo, todo era diferente. Si se le suma a esto hablar sobre tramas sociales, familiares o amorosas... temas siempre complicados para el ser humano, se vuelve aún (valga la redundancia) más complicados.
Y es en esta temática donde Grandes esperanzas aparece en todo su esplendor. Un libro difícil de comprender si se lee por primera vez y sin la atención necesaria.
La señora Havisham, un personaje tanto completo como complejo. En pocas palabras, ella para mí simboliza perfectamente a un padre (o una madre) buscando el éxito a través de su hijo.
La forma que usó Dickens para escribir el libro también la encontré genial: es totalmente impredecible, ya que a veces está lleno de amor, otras de esperanzas, otras de esfuerzo y otras de odio. El orden siempre varía en el libro y ese es el tipo de libros, que al menos a mí, me gusta.
Creo que no es necesario que hable de Pip o Estella, por ejemplo, ya que, si leyeron el libro, se sabe de quien se habla. Lo importante aquí, más que describir cada personaje, es describir el libro en general, the book as a whole.
¿Recomendable? ¡Absolutamente! Siempre y cuando se dediquen a leer el libro pacientemente, ya que la idea de este libro en particular es amarlo y sentir lo que cada personaje siente.

I had to wade through this for Year 12 English, loathed it the whole way through, and can't undersatnd the enthusiastic praise it always seems to receive. I don't get it! What's to like? The story centres around a completely unlikable twit and a stone cold bitch, surrounded by a further cast of such extreme eccentrics that you're left wondering where all the *normal* people went.

Actually, Dickens in general just gets on my nerves - I don't enjoy his writing style at all. His humour is clunky and obvious, I can always see all the places where I'm supposed to laugh. He always seems to be revelling in the cleverness of his own wit.

“You are in every line I have ever read.”

Why couldn't every line in this book be this good? I took me nearly three whole months to finish it. Not because it was bad, but because it dragged and dragged and there are far more intriguing books out there than Great Expectations.

The good stuff:
An exciting cast of characters, most of them very weird, extravagant and almost to completely ridiculous. By far my favourites are Joe - because he's such a goodhearted person - and Miss Havisham - because I totally look up to her dedication to melodrama.
What also got me hooked were the huge revelations in this book. There were a few things that I did not see coming.

The bad stuff:
Too many words, too many pages. I was completely demotivated to ever finish this, which is why I made myself write a term paper about it so that I would actually pick it up again and read all of it. I worked.
Honestly, though, this book was originally published in a Victorian Periodical. Imagine watching your favourite TV Show and waiting for a new episode every week. Well, it was like that with this novel. It was published in several instalments. The readers needed to be entertained enough so that they would buy next weeks magazine copy. This also means that Charles Dickens needed to fill the pages every week so that the readers got what they paid for. And I'm afraid it also reads like that. If this novel was 200 pages shorter, I might have enjoyed it more. There was so much going on that I didn't care about, so many details that could have been omitted.

Overall a fine classic and a well-plotted story that bored me with its obsession for things unimportant. I can't wait to watch the adoption with Helena Bonham Carter, though!

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n  "Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."n

That is such a quote. If there was ever a novel that shows us the dangers of false perceptions then it’s Great Expectations . Pip is such a fool; he constantly misjudges those around him, and he constantly misjudges his own worth. This has lead him down a road of misery because the person who held the highest expectations for Pip was Pip himself. But, in spite of this, Pip does learn the error of his ways and becomes a much better person, though not before hurting those that have the most loyalty to him.

The corrupting power of money is strong through this novel



The money Pip received clouds his vison completely. He, in his innocence, longed to be a gentleman, but when he has the chance he forgets everything thing he is. In his self-imposed aggrandisement he can only deduce that his money came from a source of respectability; his limited capacity has determined that only he, a gentleman, could receive money from a worthy source. But, what he perceives as respectable is the problem. Indeed, Dickens contrasts societies’ gentleman (created through social station) with the true gentleman of the age who may, or may not, have any money. Pip has falsely perceived that to be a gentleman one must have money, and must have the social graces that comes with it. However, this is far from the truth as Pip later learns. He thinks Joe is backward and ungentlemanly, but Joe, in reality, is more of a gentle man than Pip could ever be.

In this, he has forgotten his routes and his honest, if somewhat rough, upbringing. He has been tainted by money and the rise in class that came with it. I think if he never received the allowance he would have eventually been happy at the forge. He may have sulked for a year or two, but, ultimately, he would have got over himself as he does eventually do. The money gave him hope; it gave him a route in which he could seek his Estella. Without the money he would have realised she was, in fact, unobtainable regardless of his class; he would have moved on and got on with his life. But, that wouldn’t have made for a very interesting novel.

Pip’s journey of morale regeneration is the key

Indeed, Pip wouldn’t have learnt a thing. Through the correcting of his perceptions he learns the value of loyalty and simple human kindness. This changes him and he is, essentially, a much better person for it. He learns the errors of his ways, and how shameful and condescending his behaviour has been to those that hold him most dear, namely Joe. You can feel the pain in his narration as he tells the last parts of his story; it becomes clear that Pip could never forgive himself for his folly. He wishes forgiveness from those that love him that’s why he forgives Havisham, but I don’t think he fully deserves it. He is repentant, but the damage is done.

Heaven knows we never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of the earth, overlaying our hard hearts.



Pip’s morale regeneration was a necessary facet for the brilliance of this work. It creates an ending that, for me, was perfect. It is not the ending that Pip thought he would get, but it is the ending this novel deserved. Pip’s morale regeneration and revelations are just not enough to offset the past. He has grown but, like Havisham, cannot turn back the clocks. The ending Joe receives signifies this; he, as one of the only true gentleman of the novel, receives his overdue happiness. Whereas Pip is destined to spend the rest of his life in a state of perpetual loneliness, he, most certainly, learnt his lesson the hard way.

"Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

Anguish is in equal measures



Pip’s story though, ultimately, sad is not the most woe begotten of the character stories in this novel. Abel Magwitch and Miss Havisham are two incredibly miserable individuals because life has really got them down. Havisham is the caricature of the spinster; she is stuck in the past (quarter to nine to be precise) and is unable to move on; she has turned bitter and yellow; she has imposed herself to perpetual agony. Despite her harshness and venom there is a flicker of light within her soul that Pip unleashes. For me, she is the most memorable, and well written, character in this novel because her story transcends that of Pip’s.

And then there is the lovable Abel Magwitch. The poor man had been used and cheated; he had been bargained away and sacrificed. He has been shown no kindness in his life and when he meets a young Pip in the marshes he is touched by the small measure of friendship the boy offers him. His response: to repay that debt, with what he believes to be kindness, in turn. These characters are incredibly memorable and harbour two tragic and redemptive stories. But, in order to display their anguish to the world and society, they both use another to exact their revenge. Havisham uses Estella to break the hearts of men, like hers was once broken; Magwitch creates his “own” gentleman as a revenge to the world of gentleman that betrayed him.



I love Great Expectations. It is more than just a story of love; it is a strong story about the power of loyalty and forgiveness; it is a story about falsehoods and misperceptions; it is a story of woe and deeply felt sadness: it is about how the folly of youth can alter your life for ever. It is an extraordinary novel. I've now read it three times, and I know I'm not finished with yet.

A Tale of Two Cities will forever occupy a special place in my heart because even though adulthood sensibilities often cause childhood adoration to vanish in entirety, no one forgets a precocious reading of that first classic which reduces one to a sobbing, sniffling mess. But my memories of a first reading of this are hazy at best - the absence of guillotines lopping off heads and swoon-worthy heroes who make larger than life sacrifices could explain my much younger self's lack of appreciation. And it is only on a second reading after a gap of a decade and more can I categorize this as a novel written for adults, as a work much more worthy of 5 stars than "A Tale of Two Cities" should ever be. Predictably this rehashes many of Dickens' pet favorite themes - the orphaned, abused kid finding his way through the rat-infested, grimy bylanes of crime and penury towards self actualization, fairy godmother-stand-ins and so on - but never does it distill its thematic essence into easy dichotomies of good and evil. With all the appearance of a bildungsroman, "Great Expectations", sets out to demolish many cliched plot devices of Dickens' own creation. Pip never achieves the greatness he aspires to or even the fantasy love which planted the desire for upward social mobility in his mind, and yet his experiences enable him to become a more well-rounded individual who sees the world no longer through the rose-tinted shades of juvenile romanticism but with a maturer outlook.

n  All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to struggle for every breath I drew.n

And, of course, this features a character not found elsewhere in the wide repertoire of Victorian novels - a woman who practices misandry with varying degrees of success. Perhaps to Dickens, Miss Havisham would have been merely a plot contrivance inserted to thwart our hero's romantic success and create an atmosphere of Gothic spookiness slightly palpable in many of Dickens' fairytale-ish coming-of-age tales. But when seen through the lenses of 21st century wisdom, she encapsulates a more realistic kind of horror - a woman, whose entire life and worth are predicated on the success of her getting hitched in a patriarchal society, jilted at the altar. Not a mad woman condemned to incarceration in the attic by a tyrannical figure of patriarchal authority but a woman who chooses to sequester herself from the world of men of her own free will.
Miss Havisham is bested in the end, by her own feelings of contrition for the harm she inflicted on a young, impressionable mind, but second wave feminism will point fingers at the real culprit and exonerate her.

n  Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her; altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped body and soul, within and without, under the weight of a crushing blow.n

Pip maybe one of the most unheroic of Dickens' heroes, but he is also a proper representative of a man torn between two contradictory ideals of value judgment, forever plagued by an identity crisis so acute that he appears in my eyes as one of his most fully realized, flawed characters. So undeserving of respect or even sympathy. Further, I don't remember Dickens being as funny and wryly witty elsewhere aside from The Pickwick Papers. Either that or I seriously need to refresh memories. The only reason I felt this does not merit the five stars is because of that rather random ending, a last ditch attempt at adding roses and rainbows to a palette majorly mottled with splotches of grey. The five star rating would have been an inevitability had this penultimate Dickens novel been the wholesome tragedy it showed every possibility of becoming in the last stretch.

n  The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not relinquished. Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I have kept this. It was the subject of the only determined resistance I made in all the wretched years.n

All plot points considered, it is a tragedy. Very nearly so but not quite.

دیکنز نویسنده‌ای رئالیست است. او در عصر ویکتوریایی به طرز شگفت‌انگیزی آثاری برجسته با سبک اجتماعی خلق کرد. او در آثارش با زبانی قدرتمند از دغدغه‌های اجتماعی روز سخن می‌گوید. دیکنز به خوبی قشر فقیر و طبقات پایین اجتماع را می‌شناسد.آرزوهای بزرگ را می‌توان به نوعی زندگی‌نامهٔ خودنوشت شخص دیکنز نیز دانست که همچون آثار دیگرش تجربیات تلخ و شیرین او از زندگی و مردم را نمایان می‌سازد...
والدین چارلز نسبت به او بی توجه بودند و این مسئله او را بسیار آزار می‌داد. چارلز بیشتر وقت خود را بیرون از خانه و با خواندن کتاب‌های گوناگون می‌گذراند. تجربه‌های او از دوران گوناگون زندگیش در داستان‌ها و مقاله‌هایش بازتاب یافتند و آزردگی ناشی از وضعیت خود و مردمان طبقه ی كارگر، یكی از درونمایه‌های اصلی آثار اواست.
دیکنز به عنوان پدیده ادبی دوران خود شناخته می‌شد و به دلیل واقع‌گرایی ، سبک نگارش، توصیف های منحصر به فرد ، خلق شخصیت‌های به یاد ماندنی و نقادی اجتماعی مورد تمجید واقع شده است.
آرزوهای بزرگ از بهترین آثار دیکنز است که در نگارش این رمان از درونمایه‌های تقابل اشراف و طبقه فرودست، عشق و وحشت، قتل و جنایت می‌گوید.
او در این کتاب به واسطه اعمال و رفتار شخصیت‌ها صفات بد مثل طمع، کینه، سنگدلی و خساست را در مقابل صفات نیکویی مثل قناعت، جوانمردی، بخشش و فداکاری را نشان می‌دهد. این همان تصویر آرمانی و واقع‌گرایانه‌ای است که باعث درخشش آثار دیکنز در جهان شده است.
این رمان نشان می دهد که مالکیت و ثروت نمی توانند درون شخصیت ها را تغییر دهند و پیدا کردن خود واقعی، نیاز به طی کردن مسیری طولانی دارد، مسیری که البته در نهایت انسان را به آگاهی می رساند....
بسیاری از آثار دیکنز نخست در قالب داستان‌های دنباله دار درنشریه‌ها چاپ می شدند و او اغلب، طرح و سیر تکاملی کاراکتر‌های خود را براساس بازخورد‌ها اصلاح می‌کرد. شاید اگر اینگونه نبود، با پایان بندی مطلوب تری در این کتاب روبه رو می شدیم ...آنچنانکه مد نظر خود نویسنده بود....

خواندن آثار دیکنز به زبان اصلی و ترجمه تفاوت‌هایی دارد. چرا که منتقل کردن سبک زبانی و صنایع ادبی خاص دیکنز به فارسی کمی مشکل است و به همین دلیل ، ترجمه ی عنایت الله شکیباپور به هیچ عنوان توصیه نمی شود ، چون نتوانسته نثر توانمند و بازی های کلامی نویسنده را به خوبی انتقال دهد...

5.0 Stars What a tremendous experience reading this novel has been. I enjoyed every moment of it, and delighted in its characters, its story, and its message.

In Pip, we have a good natured young man who after meeting the beautiful Estella, becomes overly ambitious in hopes of winning her affection. Once he comes into his great expectations, he becomes convinced that Miss Haversham means for he and Estella to be together. And is stunned when this turns out not to be the case. In the last third of the book, Pip learns some valuable lessons about wealth, gratitude, love, and family. And in the end is a much better person for his experiences.

I love Pip as a character, and he is of course my favorite, but there were so many great characters in this book. Pip has some great friends in Herbert and Wemmick, and he has love of family in Joe and Biddy. Magwitch is another tremendous character, and the Pocket family is good fun. In the end even Estella seems to have overcome her upraising and turned out pretty good.

All in all, a story of mistakes and redemption. But most of all, a story of love and the family you make.

I think that I will actually miss Pip, in the coming days. I’ve enjoyed being in his world.

Superb mature Dickens with the effervescent Pip and his Great Expectations which fall a bit short of his ambitions. Lots of plot twists and wonderful descriptions of London and its suburbs as well as the Thames.

2.5

ناامیدی‌های بزرگ!ا

این اولین تجربه من از خوندن کتاب‌های چارلز دیکنز بود و بسیار مغایر بود با اون چیزی بود که انتظار داشتم.

حقیقتش تجربه خوندن این کتاب خیلی شبیه به دیدن کارتون‌های دوران کودکیمون بود. همون داستان‌ها و همون منطق داستانی. همون روایت شیرین حوادث که حتی تلخ‌ترین اتفاقات هم در اون باعث نمیشه اوقات شما لحظه‌ای مکدر بشه. به همراه کاراکترهایی که غیر واقعی هستن اما تلاشی هم برای واقعی جلوه کردن ندارن. انگار خودشون هم می‌دونن که فقط قراره نقش سرگرم کردن مخاطب رو داشته باشن، از همین جهت هم خیلی افراطی هستن. بد طینتی استلا و خانم هاریشام، مهربونی‌های جو گا��جری، رفاقت‌های بی‌کلک هربرت، پست‌فطرتی‌های آقای پامبلچوک و جدیت آقای جگرز همگی مثال‌هایی از شخصیت‌‌پردازی‌های افراطی کتاب بودن که اگرچه برای همون کارتون‌های دوران کودکی خیلی هم بامزه هستن، اما برای من که حالا اومده بودم ببینم چارلز دیکنز که این همه میگن، چیه؟! خیلی ناامید کننده بود.

داستان هم حقیقتا خیلی آبکی بود و ماجرای یک پسر بچه‌ یتیمی هست که ناگهان به یک پول و پله‌ای می‌رسه ولی نمی‌دونه از کجا و داستان همینطور کش میاد تا اینکه بالاخره می‌فهمه کی براش این پولها رو می‌فرستاده و بعد هم پایان هندی ماجرا. نیاز بیشتری به تشریح نداره بنظرم. چیز بخصوص دیگه‌ای هم نداشت. میگم، این داستان جون میده از روش کارتون بسازن برا بچه‌ها. سرگرم کننده بود ولی واقعا ارزش پونصد صفحه رمان رو نداشت.

n  The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.n

Many people consider „Great Expectations“ to be Charles Dickens‘ masterpiece, his greatest work with the most impressive cast of characters. And while I cannot comment on its quality in comparison to other well-known Dickens novels like „A Tale of Two Cities“ or „David Copperfield“, it certainly managed to live up to my expectations and even more: to make me feel part of Pip Pirrip’s life, of his relations to Miss Havisham and Estella and Joe and Herbert and all the other memorable cast members of this novel.

Great Expectations accompanies the protagonist, a young boy called Pip, during his journey through life, his struggling and his attempts to overcome the obstacles life has thrown into his path. Being raised as an orphan by his elder sister and her kind-hearted and generous husband Joe, Pip faces the scales of fate, unease and love when being introduced to the eccentric Miss Havisham, a wealthy woman and one of the most memorable characters of the entire novel. Pip falls in love with Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter Estella, and several years later, a mysterious benefactor finances Pip’s climbing into the higher parts of English society. Confronted with dangerous secrets, friendships and enmities alike and a love foredoomed to failure, Pip is forced to find his place in life, to grow up and stand on his own feet – a task which proves to be more difficult than he would ever have imagined.

n  According to my experience, the conventional notion of a lover cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorror, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.n

Apart from the perfect way Dickens weaves the words he chooses in, he also manages to characterize his protagonists in such an easily remembered style that you can’t help but feel sorry for what Pip, Estella or even Miss Havisham have to endure. Pip, the first-person-narrator and thus the character we have to spend the entirety of the novel with, is known to the reader from the very first days of his (conscious) existence, and Dickens allows us to accompany him on his troublesome way through life during his childhood and his early adolescence. While not always the most likeable person, Pip remains a realistic character with faults and mistakes of his own, the essential aspect which ultimately defines human beings.

n  “Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt, […], and of course if it ceased to beat I should cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no – sympathy – sentiment – nonsense.“n

The character of Estella is another person we encounter during her childhood and whom we accompany while growing up. While Pip misses significant parts of her life, the reader is also able to judge Estella’s development through Pip’s eyes, which – of course – can’t be a reliable perspective, but even more emphasizes the love Pip feels for Estella. The true scales of Estella’s coldheartedness and her hostile behaviour will become clearer during the course of the novel, and it is not surprising that she is a character you find yourself wanting to know a lot more of. In modern days, Estella might be a (stereo-)typical prude, someone people are fascinated with, but never quite manage to get through to the core of her soul. Raised by Miss Havisham, Estella is far from the happiness other girls her age might be allowed to experience, yet those lessons of life she has to learn very early draw her character and her behaviour more significantly than anything else.

n  “Love her, love her, love her! If she favors you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her! […] I adopted her, to be loved. I bed her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her! […] I’ll tell you […] what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter – as I did.“n

Oh, Miss Havisham. Throughout the entire course of the novel, she was the character I looked forward to meeting again the most, who I missed the most when not present in Pip’s narrations, who I want to know more of even now, after finishing the novel. Such a well-drawn character with a tortured soul and wishes and desires of her own based on her fateful experiences. In contrast to the time this novel was written in by Charles Dickens, today’s literature is partly marked by many authors developing trilogies out of their stories in order to write more stuff about their characters (which is a general direction I definitely don’t approve of due to various reasons), but if there ever was a story which I wanted to follow more closely, more elaborately, more intensively, it would certainly be Great Expectations. The mysterious appearances of Miss Havisham and Estella were very appealing to me; not knowing their true destinations, their true motivations before their reveal to the main character Pip was even more appealing; but reading something about their thoughts from their own points of view would have been most appealing. I wouldn’t want Charles Dickens to have written his novel from any other perspective – this merely emphasizes how memorably and full of potential he has managed to draw his characters.

n  There was a melancholy wind, and the marshes were very dismal. A stranger would have found them insupportable, and even to me they were so oppressive that I hesitated, half inclined to go back.n

His ability of developing a setting, a Gothic atmosphere, which will allow you to feel part of the story, is one of the aspects which ultimately succeeded in allowing Dickens to become as popular as he later did. Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did. –I could not have expressed it in any better way than George Orwell did in this sentence. The novel did have some flaws, after all. I needed to read chapter summaries on the Internet to figure out how Pip was related to people like Mr. Jaggers, Wemmick or Bentley Drummle, party because I wasn’t particularly interested in those characters, partly because I only read one chapter at a time and thus was likely to forget aspects and not remember exact details when reading about them again. However, Great Expectations influenced me like few other novels managed to do before. Whether it was Pip’s friendship with Herbert, his love for Estella or the complicated relation to Joe – Dickens made me fear with Pip, feel for Pip, and hope for Pip to find happiness.

The first 5* this year.

Some books are better to read later. I am very happy that I read Great Expectations now and not when I was at school. I probably wouldn't had enjoyed then and It would have been such a pity. I think I am becoming quite a fan of Victorian literature.

Great Expectations. What a superb title this is; wonderful, in the best and truest sense of the word. It is upbeat, exciting, and full of intrigue. It quickens our pulse and gives us a little thrilling frisson. Who is it, who has these “Great Expectations”? We want to meet them. We want to share their anticipations and their pleasure. We are hooked into the story by these first two words.

Perhaps most significant of all is that it is a short, memorable title. Great Expectations is one of Charles Dickens’s latest novels, his thirteenth in fact, serialised weekly, in his newspaper “All the Year Round” in nine monthly sections between December 1860 and August 1861. It was also serialised in the US – oddly a few days before - and on the continent. Then Dickens’s publishers, Chapman and Hall, published the first edition in book form in three volumes in 1861, with five subsequent reprints, and a one-volume edition in 1862. Sadly Dickens had quarrelled with his great friend and illustrator Hablot Knight Browne, “Phiz”, so there are none of his quirky and instantly recognisable illustrations. The silver lining in this cloud is that there are a plethora of illustrations by other artists, both contemporaneous and later. They vary from the absurd, clearly mimicking Phiz’s caricatures, to increasingly ghastly ghouls, and stuffed shirt heroes. Some are darkly effective, capturing the gothic mood, but others make the reader yearn for Phiz’s perception and insightful eye.

Dickens was only to write more novel, “Our Mutual Friend”, plus an unfinished one, aptly named “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” (a mystery never to be solved, although plenty have tried).

By now Dickens was a master of his craft. He had abandoned the lengthy titles, which sometimes took up half a page and which are rarely used in full. He had also learned, wisely, that his public liked optimism. Other short titles such as “Hard Times” and “Bleak House” had preceded this one, but they reek of Victorian deprivation and hardship. They do not attract us in the same way, nor are they timeless in appeal, whereas the title Great Expectations could have been coined yesterday.

In other ways too this novel stands head and shoulders above some of the others which precede it. Dickens always had an eye to his popularity, and whereas “Bleak House” may well be his greatest novel, it is not, and has never been, his most popular. It is so weighty that it is in danger of toppling over, and many readers struggle with the complexity of it. There are several interwoven plots, and although it contains some of his finest writing, Dickens makes few concessions to those who prefer one strong thread to follow. Conversely Great Expectations has a streamlined plot which moves along at a good pace. We are mesmerised by the forceful characters, and crave desperately to unravel the mysteries. It could be argued that of Dickens’s novels, Great Expectations makes the greatest use of plot, characterisation and style, sacrificing a little of the dense maze of “Bleak House”’s annals for more urgency, a simpler story focus, and a strong sense of direction.

In Great Expectations Dickens returns to one of his favourite themes: the story of a young man, and how he grows and learns through his various experiences. It is at heart a bildungsroman, or “coming of age” story. Some of the best loved novels by Dickens follow this format, for instance, “David Copperfield”, “Nicholas Nickleby” and most notably, the hugely popular rags-to-riches story, “Oliver Twist”. Yet the difference in execution between these two is startling.

“Oliver Twist” is recognisably an early work by Dickens and has all his idiosyncratic features. It has a myriad of cameos, both comic and grotesque. It has a strong social conscience, humour, and tragedy. But it also has all the faults of a young writer fully on display. It is overful of hyperbole, with a cardboard hero who is well nigh a saint. It is overwritten. We are shocked at the social conditions, but swayed by the pathos rather than by the author’s writing skills. By the time of his autobiographical novel, “David Copperfield”, Dickens had honed his skills. In fact before embarking on Great Expectations he reread “David Copperfield”, fearing that he might unintentionally repeat himself.

With Great Expectations Dickens has reached his pinnacle. He has written a novel full of heartbreak and obsessions of various kinds, and the reader is putty in his hands. He has learned to control his expostulations; his declamatory outbursts, his overt theatricality, and therefore has written a much more gripping and persuasive novel.

This is a novel with everything you could want. There is adventure, excitement, horror and passion. There is madness and vast wealth beyond imagination, and a benefactor who is to remain mysterious until the denouement. There are vicious crimes, wife-beating and murders, duplicity and depravity, malicious cruelty, and characters crazed by love and obsession. There is humour, ridicule, absurdity - and overwhelming sadness and grief. It is, in short, a perfect Dickens novel. It is a gothic masterpiece. You will thrill to the horrors of Satis House and its half-crazed inhabitant. You will despair at the ineptitude of the hero, blinded by his passion for a young woman whose heart has been turned to stone. You will cry for the nobility of the steadfast Joe, wanting nothing for himself; only wanting to do what is right.

The central character is Pip, Philip Pirrip, plagued by his feelings of inferiority at his thick boots and coarse hands. He desires wealth and status, and for some part of the novel it looks as if he might be groomed for this. We do not have much compassion for Pip. He seems an insensitive, selfish and self-centred brat of a boy, for more than half the novel. Once destined to become a gentleman, Pip becomes increasingly arrogant and embarrassed by what he sees as his humble origins - and unforgivably casts off the man who had been his protector. We wonder how he will ever become the Dickens hero we feel he must inevitably become. For Dickens’s novels are not tragedies, although they have tragic elements among the mix. The deserving are usually rewarded in the end, and the cruel, wicked or manipulative characters usually suffer an ignominious fate. Dickens liked to please his readers; to make them feel life was as it should be. It reassured them that however messy their own lives were, things would work out alright for the heroic characters they had been reading about and championing in their newspapers, for over a year.

Is this then an exception? Do we have a “bad boy”; an anti-hero against the usual Dickens type? The answer is no. Dickens, once more, has used his skill and created a superb subtly layered novel. The novel is straightforward in its time frame, with events moving forward logically, except where there is some reported history which is usually crucial to move the story along, by one of the characters. But in among the intrigue and the action, we hear the voices of three Pips, and occasionally an omniscient narrator (and occasionally even Dickens himself, when he cannot resist giving an opinion or two, or poking fun at one of his creations).

Five voices? Surely then, it must be hard to read? And again, the answer is no. It moves seamlessly between the voices, yet they add a richness and depth. We know that Pip is to become a deserving character; an upright young man. And we know this because we see him there on the page, in every word that he narrates. We see the characters through his eyes, and we gain a full picture of them. We see the young boy’s impressions, doubts and fears; the older boy’s vanity, shallow ambitions and intolerance, and we see the older, wiser Philip Pirrip, now grown into his full name and maturity, and reporting as truthfully as he can on the vagaries of his youth.

And the story he has to tell thrills us. Dickens himself referred to it as “a grotesque tragicomic conception”. It is unbelievably grotesque and riddled with gloom, full of coincidences, with highly exaggerated vivid characters, yet we believe every word, and are compelled to keep turning the page. We soak up the darkly terrifying descriptions, and the ominous sense of place. We wonder - surely these places could not exist. Nor the characters? But yes, they could, and yes, sometimes they did.

Great Expectations begins in a churchyard where Pip’s family is buried, and where he is to have a devastating meeting with someone who strikes terror into his very soul. The churchyard is based on a desolate church in the village of Cooling, lying out among the marshes seven miles from “Gads Hill”, Dickens’s family home at that time. He describes Cooling Castle ruins and the marshes evocatively, imbuing the narrative with dark foreboding and menace. The young Pip, visiting his family’s graves, is very close to Dickens’s heart. As a young child himself, between the ages of 5 and 11, he had lived in Chatham, and this is only a couple of miles away from Cooling. In fact this is when he first admired “Gads Hill”, the house he was later to buy. These descriptions were all transcribed from memory – complete with the young child’s terror at the stark scene, the unforgiving bleak marshes, the sea, the swirling mists, wind and rain, the beacon of distant light, and the gibbet and chains.

These early scenes are very ghoulish, for instance as the stranger threatens to cut out Pip’s heart and liver, but they exemplify the morbid relish Dickens excels in. They are a perfect example of black humour, because the events are described from a child’s point of view, as he is almost petrified with fear. Even the tombstones of Pip’s siblings, the “five little stone lozenges”, is a light-hearted reference to something common enough, but really full of pathos and tragedy. Cooling churchyard actually contains not just five but thirteen child graves all together, from two families in the village who were related. Perhaps Dickens - unusually - toned this down, for fear of scepticism on the part of his readers.

Pip is brought up by his termagant of a sister, full of bitterness and self-inflicted martyrdom, knocking her husband Joe’s head against the wall or banging Pip’s head like a tambourine with her thimble. She is proud of having brought Pip up “by hand” - such a sarcastic double-edged phrase - making copious use of ��the Tickler” - such a gentle name for something which was capable of inflicting a great deal of pain! The lively and caustic descriptions make us smile, although the smile may well be a rueful grimace. Joe Gargery’s forge, incidentally, where Pip lives with them both, really exists. It is located at Chalk village in Kent. Dickens and his wife Catherine had stayed there on their honeymoon in 1836.

What about the historical facts; are they accurate? The answer is mostly, yes, although some dramatic license has been taken with the timing. Convicts in Britain were not actually sent to America any more at the time of Great Expectations. It had stopped in 1776, and after then they were sent to Australia. It is estimated that 140,000 criminals were transported to Australia between 1810 and 1852 and this is 8 years before this novel was published. Transportation was abolished in 1857, but was as the novel says, for life. If a convict ever returned to Britain, they were hanged (by law, until 1834), even though the original offences were sometimes quite minor by modern standards.

Dickens was also particular as to detail. There are two exciting and dramatic river scenes in the book, one at the beginning in the marshes, and an echo of it as the novel rushes headlong along the river to its climax. Dickens wanted to ensure that his description of the course of the boat was authentic under these conditions. In order to make absolutely sure, and perhaps explore further possibilities, he hired a steamer for the day of 22nd May 1861. The route was from Blackwall to Southend. Accompanying him on board were eight or nine friends, and also three or four members of his family. They all assumed Dickens was enjoying a relaxed summer day out, as he entertained them as usual. But in truth, his mind was working overtime, keenly observing and noticing every single detail. Nothing escaped his attention, as he made a mental note of what happened on each side of the river during the course of their journey.

The vast edifice, “Satis House”, home of the decrepit and grief-stricken Miss Havisham, was based on “Restoration House” in Rochester, Kent. Charles II had stayed there on his return to England in 1660, restoring the English monarchy after Oliver Cromwell. Dickens turned it into a crumbling ruin, full of cobwebs (and their menacing lurkers), rats and dust. The only light to be seen is Estella, the “star”, either as herself, or by the candle she bears amidst the gloom. Yet even now you can visit “Restoration House” if you choose, and marvel at how it was transformed into a temple of filth, ruin and chaos, rotten with decay and perversion, an almost living presence, when the master magician Dickens wove his spell.

So we see chapter and verse about the places. They do exist, yet the view of them here is unique and powerful, seen through Dickens’s eyes. We also know that he often liked to include people he knew in his novels, sometimes in homage, but with notorious or famous celebrities of his time, it was more often to poke fun at them. Are there any such in Great Expectations. Certainly there are, yes. Just think of the most likely character, the most over-the-top grotesque imaginable. Are you thinking of Miss Havisham, crazed by her grief and loss  who had vowed to wreak havoc on all mankind? For, incredibly, she is based on a real person.

She is very probably based on Eliza Emily Donnithorne of Camperdown, Sydney, Australia. Miss Donnithorne was a recluse and an eccentric. She had been jilted on her wedding day, and spent the rest of her life in a darkened house, leaving her wedding cake to rot, as it was on the table. She also left her front door permanently ajar, in case her groom ever returned.

At the time of writing this novel, Dickens was 48 to 49 years of age. His domestic life was in tatters, as it had rapidly gone downhill in the late 1850s, and he had now separated from his wife, Catherine. He was having a secret affair with an actress, the much younger Ellen Ternan, who could well be the basis for the character of Estella.

During the writing of Great Expectations, Dickens went on tour, reading and acting out parts of his immensely popular novels. In March and April 1861 alone, he gave six public readings. More like performances, they were very successful in every way, but it took a terrible toll on his health.

There are so many ways of sharing reactions to this novel. I have just tried to give a few here. You will find unforgettable characters here, as in all Dickens’s novels. You will laugh at Crabb’s boy’s antics and Uncle Pumblechook’s absurd pomposity. You will loathe the brutish bully, Bentley Drummle and the sly lazy Orlick. You will be in fear and awe of Abel Magwitch, and also, in a different way, of Mr Jaggers, the Old Bailey lawyer. Clever and sharp, “putting a case” but never admitting anything, he remains clinically dispassionate to the last, forever and literally, like Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of the dirty business he had to follow.

You may learn to love his clerk, the kind-hearted Wemmick, with his “postbox” of a mouth, his insistence of the value of “portable property”, and keeping a nice distinction between home life and business life; not to mention the “aged P”, nodding away enthusiastically. Both of these provide some much-needed light relief, in their fortified miniature haven, away from the throng and bustle of the avaricious, mercantile, heartless capital, with its filth, grime and squalor. Wemmick says one may get “cheated, robbed, or murdered in London”.

Such affectionate portraits, these. There is Pip’s true friend, the “pale young gentleman” Herbert Pocket, and his hilariously feckless family; loyal to a fault, but hopelessly impractical, and at a loss to organise their lives. Herbert is so good-natured; the scenes where he demonstrates how to behave in polite society are a delight. Immediately saying that he and Pip are harmonious, he asks if he might call him Handel, because of the “charming piece of music, by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith”. Herbert uses the words “dear” and “good” whenever he refers to Pip, and is genial, frank, friendly, and decent, which Pip has rarely seen.

Perhaps you will admire quiet Biddy and her simple wisdom, seeing far and away more than any other character, or sturdy Joe, the salt of the earth, who offered Pip unconditional love and friendship, and taught him life’s true values. Perhaps you too will be besotted with haughty, beautiful Estelle, who unknown to both Pip and herself is equally a puppet, or cry at the hopelessness of Miss Havisham’s situation, driven half-mad by her obsession and surrounded by sycophantic relatives.

Whenever I see people refer to Dickens’s simpering women, I think of the myriad of strong female characters such as she, or Pip’s demonic whirlwind of a sister, who was “always on the rampage”, or the venomously vindictive Madame Defarge from “A Tale of Two Cities”, or the duplicitous lady’s maid Hortense in “Bleak House”, who was based on a real life murderess, or Nancy, the tragic prostitute in “Oliver Twist”. And there are many, many more. Dickens’s novels are packed with strong women, both good and bad. It is merely that Dickens conformed to the Victorian ideal of female goodness for his heroines. They were to be virtuous, competent, intelligent and compliant, and these are not seen as quite such admirable qualities in the present century.

No, Great Expectations is peopled with characters I am always sad to leave, as I turn the final page. Each time I read it I feel despair, horror and joy in equal measure, and surprised in such a novel to find I burst out laughing at some ridiculous aside or eccentric cameo I had forgotten. Each time I am completely taken up in the twists and turns; one plot twist close to the end will take your breath away when you first learn it. It feels so right, yet Dickens manages to conceal it all the way through. This is a novel where the intrigue is laced throughout. I defy you to guess the ending, should it not be already familiar to you.

Do you want a happy ending for young Pip? He does have one, of sorts. But Dickens was still not satisfied that it was acceptable, after his friend, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton had said it was too sad, so he wrote an alternative couple of paragraphs at the end, slightly changing its course, and leaving it deliberately vague. The original ending was not revealed until after his death, when his mentor and biographer John Forster wrote of it. Many critics do prefer the original darker ending, as being more in keeping with the dark nature of the story. Perhaps you may prefer the Victorian rewrite however, and to imagine a more upbeat and better future for our young hero. Most editions print the original ending afterwards, so the choice is yours.

But please, if you have never read this novel, make sure you leave a place for it in your reading life. I am sure you won’t regret it.

“We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I.”

“Wot larks Pip ol’ chap, wot larks!”