‘It is a principle… that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner.’ - Charles Dickens


Great Expectations once again exceeded expectations when I re-read it for perhaps the third time in many years. I was surprised at how strongly the story/plot engaged me afresh even though I knew it like the back of my hand. I took special delight in Dickens’ very fine, stately, and elegant prose. I relished his vivid description of the dreary marsh country or Miss Havisham’s spider-infested wedding cake. I became well acquainted with each of his vivacious characters. Most of all, Great Expectations is an exploration of the vanity of human wishes and what is left of humanity after great expectations have been well lost.

Philip Pirrip, better known as Pip, is a seven-year-old orphan brought up by a domineering adult sister who is married to Joe Gargery, the blacksmith. Pip and Joe are ‘fellow-sufferers’ under the tyranny of Mrs Gargery who is said to have brought them up ‘by hand.’ Pip is poor but rich and secure in Joe’s love and protection. All this is changed when Pip is invited to play at the house of Miss Havisham, an eccentric but wealthy woman, who hired him to teach her adoptive daughter, the beautiful and scornful Estella, how to wreak revenge on all men by breaking their hearts. For the first time, Pip sees himself as ‘coarse and common’. He admits to his own misery: “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home... Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper. But Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it...Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.”

One of the things that struck me is how similar Pip is to Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. In his confession to Biddy, Pip says, “The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s, and she’s more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account.” And thus, Pip dreams of one day becoming a gentleman. Like Jay Gatsby who builds all his hopes on Daisy Buchanan’s false, silvery voice, Pip is to spend a good part of his adult life wanting to become a gentleman for Estella’s sake. Estella is a cold, distant star; Daisy is that elusive green light across the bay. Like Gatsby, Pip’s dream comes true. An unknown benefactor releases Pip from Joe’s forge and plants him in London to be educated as a gentleman and to have access to all its attendant privileges. In Pip, as in Gatsby, great expectations rest on an empty dream, which amounted to naught.

Expectations aside, Great Expectations is a wonderful story about the best of kinship, friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice. These themes are exemplified in Joe Gargery’s steadfast love for Pip, Herbert Pocket’s ever-giving friendship, and Abel Magwitch’s gratitude and self-sacrifice. On the flip side, it reveals the untold damage caused by deception, betrayal, and revenge as reflected in the wasted lives of Miss Havisham (the spurned bride) and to a lesser degree, Estella. To a significant degree, Magwitch’s life, too.

Great Expectations has a cast of fascinating characters and their idiosyncrasies come alive in Dicken’s unsparing and often humorous description. My favorite is Wemmick, Mr. Jagger’s clerk and Pip’s friend. Wemmick is said to have a post-office mouth into which he pops his biscuits. Yet, he is a modern man who builds a lovely castle for himself and his aged father, and makes it a point to demarcate his private life from his work life. His one obsession is with ‘portable property’ and he wears many rings that once belonged to executed convicts. The episode of Wemmick’s surprise and low-key wedding is a joy to read. Also memorable are Mr. Jaggers, the formidable lawyer with a pervasive smell of scented soap; Mr. Pumblechook, the pompous corn and seeds merchant who claims to be Pip’s earliest benefactor; and all the ‘toadies and humbugs’, fawning relatives of Miss Havisham.

Great Expectations is a timeless and magnificent classic. What larks! Thank you, Mr. Dickens.

Maybe I need a break from the classics, simple nothing special as story goes.

“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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"Ningún hombre puede simular lo que no es. No hay barniz capaz de disimular el grano de la madera, y cuando más barniz se le pone, más se nota el grano."

No es necesario leer muchas novelas de su vasta obra para reconocer que Charles Dickens es el mejor narrador de novelas de formación o Bildungsroman en la historia de la literatura y es además uno de los mejores cinco novelistas que uno pueda leer.
Dostoievski en Rusia, Balzac en Francia, Dickens en Inglaterra. Es así de simple cuando de grandes novelistas del siglo XIX hablamos.
"Grandes esperanzas" es su antepenúltima novela y fue publicada entre 1860 y 1861 en la revista literaria All the Year Round fundada por él mismo.
La novela encarna el típico patrón de personajes que Dickens ponía en sus historias, la del joven huérfano o pobre que se abre camino en la vida a los golpes y enfrentando todo tipo de sortilegios, obstáculos y necesidades.
Este modelo de niño desamparado que se hace camino en la vida dependiendo de sus propios esfuerzos, seguramente es similar a otras de sus novelas como sus célebres "David Copperfield", "Oliver Twist", "La pequeña Dorrit" o "Nicholas Nickleby" (en menor medida) y hace que el argumento utilizado por Dickens sea casi el mismo, pero cambiando las circunstancias que rodean al personaje principal.
Es innegable pensar que sus historias se parecen (a mi entender y puede que esto suene a desagrado para ciertos lectores)
De hecho, al igual que Copperfield, el personaje principal de la novela, Philip Pirrip o Pip, como él se hace llamar, es vapuleado por la brutal y desalmada manera en que lo trata (y educa) su propia hermana en donde la violencia está a la orden del día.
En "David Copperfield", es la institución de la escuela y sus desalmados maestros los que aplican esa misma violencia. Y en ambas novelas hay un benefactor, siendo en ésta el exitoso abogado Mr. Jaggers quien trabaja para un enigmático benefactor, el encargado de sacarlos de aprietos y darle la oportunidad de su vida.
La lista de personajes no es larga. Tenemos a su violenta hermana, Mrs. Gargery, al esposo de esta Joe Gargery quien adquirirá un rol fundamental en la novela, y también otros muy importantes como el Sr. Pumblechook, el señor Wemmick, el Sr. Woople, la señora Havisham y su hija Estella, el personaje femenino que oficiará como partenaire de Pip en "Grandes esperanzas".
Otro rol clave en esta historia lo ocupa Herbert Pocket, el amigo inseparable de Pip. Mucho más adelante aparecerá el verdadero protector de Pip, pero eso lo dejamos en secreto.
"Grandes esperanzas" es el fiel reflejo de una época crucial de Inglaterra, la de la era victoriana.
Con una destreza impecable, Dickens nos ofrece un retrato de la sociedad inglesa de su época, sus costumbres, sus vicios y por supuesto, sus esperanzas.
Otro punto alto de esta novela es que Dickens conoce Londres como la palma de su mano. No hay calle, rincón o edificio que el autor no reconozca. Esto es algo que algún tiempo después perfeccionará James Joyce con Dublín en sus novelas "Ulises", "Finnegans Wake" o su libro de cuentos "Dublineses".
"Grandes esperanzas" resume la visión que Charles Dickens tenía de la vida y nos regala todos los ingredientes para leer una novela en la que reafirma su talento que permanece inalterable en el tiempo.

A revelation and a delight---those were my reactions on reading, then on finishing, Great Expectations, first read, and not enjoyed while in high school, only slightly remembered from that time(vague recall about who his actual patron might be).

This second experience, oh so many years later, has reawakened the joy of reading the Victorian serial novel. I looked forward to picking this book up each time I did so. I chuckled and laughed with some of Dickens words, names and descriptions, enjoyed the characters he developed, and the variety of emotions he could elicit. What a master.

Among my favorites---Pip's progress toward self knowledge itself, Wemmick and the Aged One, Herbert and so many in that little village, who are all drawn so well. And Dickens' descriptive skills--of the marshes, the boats on the Thames, Newgate, the death masks. So many details that complement and forward the action.

Now I want and plan to read more of Dickens as soon as I'm able. As always it's the scheduling that is the hardest part.

It has been a very long time since I last read this book but it was still every bit as good as I remembered. I was very interested too to find out which parts of it I still remembered well and which parts I had totally forgotten!

Great Expectations is certainly one of Dickens’ best books. He always wrote great characters, good stories and wonderful observations of everyday life. In this book he brings all that plus humour, danger and some spooky stuff too. Who could forget the scene where little Pip meets the convict for the first time? Or our very first meeting with Miss Haversham in her bridal gown.

There are so many great characters it is impossible to pick a favourite. Poor Pip is not very likeable for most of the story but comes good in the end. Wemmick and Herbert are excellent friends for him and Wemmick in particular has some of the best scenes with the castle and the Aged P. Even Estella discovers in the end that she does have a heart.

All very enjoyable and now I am inspired to reread some more Dickens - maybe David Copperfield next?

It's the book that turned me off of Dickens. I still shudder when I think of being forced to read it in high school. The descriptions just go on forever...make it stop!

Pip, an orphan, meets an escaped convict and treats him kindly. This simple action will change Pip's life forever. Pip falls in love with Estella, a cold-hearted girl, who, thanks to bitter Miss Havisham, has been well-trained as a heartbreaker. She is wealthy and looks down on Pip, a poor boy with no expectations.

When a mysterious benefactor gives Pip a fortune, Pip is sure that becoming a gentleman is the way to win Estella's heart. Pip spends most of the novel feeling ashamed of the people who love him and sacrifices everything to pursue Estella, who couldn't care less for him.

I have never been brave enough to pick this one up again, even though I may well appreciate it now. This book is perfect for readers who enjoy a writer who uses twenty words when one will do!

Update June, 2019: One of my favorite bookish podcasts, Backlisted, recently featured a discussion of Great Expectations where they shared their insights and heaped lots of love on this Dickens classic. Definitely worth a listen if you love Dickens! https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/90...

I’m late to the party in reading Dickens. Everyone I’ve told that I’m reading Great Expectations said they hated having to read Dickens in school. I can empathize with that given how long and dense this book is – I thought it was never going to get to the end - but, I’m glad I’ve come to Dickens later in my own life because I love his storytelling and writing!

When we meet our hero, Philip Pirrup, or Pip as we will know him, he is a young boy who lost his parents and is being raised in very meager circumstances by his (mean) sister and her (caring, simple) husband Joe Gargary, the local blacksmith. He freely roams the eerie marshes that surround their home and small town. One day young Pip gets an invitation to visit reclusive Miss Havisham to see if he can be a companion to her. When he approaches her falling down mansion, I felt like I was in the audience of a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, yelling at him “Nooooo! Turn Back!”. Of course, he doesn’t and he meets one of the most iconic literary characters ever, she who is stuck in time, rotting away from bitterness after being stood up at her wedding many years in the past. He also meets Estella, a young ward of Miss Havisham, who becomes the love of Pip’s life. But will Pip become the love of Estella’s life? Ah, the first of many questions he will be seeking answers for in Great Expectations. At Miss Havisham’s he clearly sees that he is a “common and course” uneducated boy, which simultaneously makes him feel bad and inspires him to greater things.

Fast forward a few years. He has become apprenticed to Joe to learn the trade of blacksmithing, not something that supports his vision of better things for himself. One day he learns that an anonymous benefactor has given him an endowment that comes with, you guessed it, great expectations. He immediately outfits himself in clothing fit for a gentleman and moves to London to begin his life of expectations. Things don’t always go smoothly for him, and, unfortunately he goes way over the top in this endeavor, getting carried away with himself and putting himself in great debt. After all he doesn’t have any training in how to be a gentleman, nor any good examples in his upbringing. You can see where this is going! But even though you know where this is headed – probably no place good – the ride to get there is exhilarating and rarely predictable.

Dickens writes with great energy and humor. There’s a diverse cast of memorable characters with great names (as you would expect with Dickens!) that keep things interesting and moving forward. Great Expectations is a story of human nature and a cautionary tale for the ages. Even though Dickens wrote this in 1861, the themes of love, loyalty, betrayal, integrity, meanness, class and upward/downward mobility could be easily transported to the 21st Century.

On another note, I just watched the classic 1946 David Lean movie and, while I loved seeing young John Mills and Alec Guiness, unlike the book, it definitely showed its age.

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.

My thoughts while reading this book...
n  n

LOVED !

My students (and some of my friends) can't ever figure out why I love this novel so much. I explain how the characters are thoroughly original and yet timeless, how the symbolism is rich and tasty, and how the narrative itself is juicy and chock-full of complexity, but they just shake their heads at me in utter amazement and say, "What's wrong with you, dude?"

What's wrong, indeed.

I give them ten or fifteen years. Perhaps they'll have to read it again in college, or maybe they'll just try reading it again as an adult to see if they can try to figure out why it's such a "classic," but after some time has passed from their initial encounter with the novel, they will find that I am not so crazy after all and that the book is in fact one of the best examples--if not the best example--of the novel. This happens to me all the time: I will re-read something I was forced to read in middle school and high school, remembering how much I hated it then, and will find that I actually love it now, as an adult. Sure, those "classics" may have taught me something about literary analysis, symbolic patterns, and the like, but I couldn't appreciate it for its complexity until I was older. I guess the rule of wine appreciation applies here, too: good taste only comes after much patience and experience.

***

Perhaps the thing I love best about this novel is the cast of characters--their names as well as their personalities. Ms. Havisham is one of my favorite characters to ever appear in all of the literature I have read. There is so much density and complexion to her character that I could literally make an entire career out of writing discourses on her characterization. She has even invaded the way I think about the world and the people I have met: I have, for instance, started referring to those instances where parents try to achieve success through their children "the Havisham effect" (unfortunately, you see this all too often in the world of teaching). Havisham's name is another exasperatingly fantastic aspect of her character: like the majority of Dickens' characters, you pretty much know what you're in for when you first read her name--she is full of lies, tricks, and deceits (or "sham"s). You don't get this sort of characterization much of anywhere else in the literary scene.

Another reason I love this novel so much is its plotting. Remember, Dickens was writing in a serialized format so he needed to keep his readers hooked so that they'd want to buy the next issue of his periodical, All the Year Round, in order to see what happens next. Thus, the plot of Great Expectations is winding, unpredictable, and quite shocking at points. Certainly, in terms of heavy action--well, what our youngsters these days would call action, fighting and big explosions and what-not--there is none, or very little at most, but that's not the thing to be looking for. Figure out the characters first, and then, once you've gotten to know and even care for them (or hate them), you will be hooked on the plot because you will want to know what happens to these people who you've invested so much feeling into. This is, of course, true of all novels, but it's what I tell my students when they read Great Expectations for the first time, and by gum, it's helped more than a few of them get through the novel successfully.

So, if you read Great Expectations in middle school, high school, or college, but haven't picked it up since, I urge you to do so. With a more patient and experienced set of eyes, you just might surprise yourself.