Great Expectations (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Great Expectations, described by G. K. Chesterton as a “study in human weakness and the slow human surrender,” may be called Charles Dickens’s finest moment in a remarkably illustrious literary career. In an overgrown churchyard, a grizzled convict springs upon an orphan named Pip. The convict terrifies the young boy and threatens to kill him unless Pip helps further his escape. Later, Pip finds himself in the ruined garden where he meets the bitter and crazy Miss Havisham and her foster child Estella, with whom he immediately falls in love. After a secret benefactor gives him a fortune, Pip moves to London, where he cultivates great expectations for a life which would allow him to discard his impoverished beginnings and socialize with the idle upper class. As Pip struggles to become a gentleman and is tormented endlessly by the beautiful Estella, he slowly learns the truth about himself and his illusions. Written in the last decade of his life, Great Expectations reveals Dickens’s dark attitudes toward Victorian society, its inherent class structure, and its materialism. Yet this novel persists as one of Dickens’s most popular. Richly comic and immensely readable, Great Expectations overspills with vividly drawn characters, moral maelstroms, and the sorrow and pity of love. Introduction and Notes by Radhika Jones “Pip’s eagerness to embrace his ‘Expectations’—the package deal designed by a secret benefactor to set him up as a London gentleman—goes hand in hand with his eagerness to shed the blacksmith’s apprenticeship and country connections that he feels have kept him down in the world. To look back, once he has magically obtained the means to go forward, would be to acknowledge his origins—the very act from which his expectations are to free him. Pip’s frequent backward glances in narrative mode thus highlight a tension central to Dickens’s plot. What these great expectations ultimately do, of course, is to send Pip right back to his story’s beginning, to the stolen file and pork pie that bind his fate to that of a convict.” —from the Introduction by Radhika Jones The managing editor of Grand Street magazine and a freelance writer, Radhika Jones is also a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, into a family burdened with financial troubles. Despite his deprived beginnings, however, he achieved national renown upon the publication of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. His early novels Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and A Christmas Carol solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. When Dickens was in his late thirties, his social criticism became biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still. David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend are the great works of his masterful and prolific later period.


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