Overview
Pip receives a mysterious fortune and pursues gentility in London, only to discover that wealth is a poor substitute for loyalty and genuine affection.
Dickens published Great Expectations in serial form in 1860-61, relatively late in his career. The novel follows the orphan Pip as he is lifted, through mysterious circumstances, from a blacksmith's forge into London gentility — and then discovers the source of his expectations is not what he believed. The book is shorter and tighter than Dickens's earlier serialised novels, and many readers consider it his masterpiece.
Key Ideas
The Illusion of Social Status
Being a true gentleman has nothing to do with money.
Gratitude and Loyalty
Pip's redemption begins when he recognizes the worth of those he abandoned.
The Danger of Unrealistic Dreams
Fantasies blind us to genuine happiness.
Who should read this
Readers who want their first serious Dickens. Great Expectations is more focused than Bleak House or Little Dorrit, and its first-person narration (unusual for Dickens) gives it a coherence his earlier omniscient novels sometimes lack. The opening chapter, with the convict in the churchyard, is one of the most perfect openings in English fiction.
Who might skip it
Skip if you don't like coincidence-heavy Victorian plotting; Dickens's reveal of Magwitch's role depends on coincidences modern readers sometimes find strained. Skip also if you've read the book once and didn't like Pip; he is not a wholly sympathetic narrator, and that is the book's point.
The verdict
The Dickens novel I come back to most often. The first-person voice disciplines Dickens in ways his other books sometimes lack, and the moral development of Pip — from childhood fear to snobbery to self-knowledge — is one of the most complete arcs in Victorian fiction. The original ending (Dickens wrote two) is the better one; the more famous hopeful version was added under pressure.
"I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape."
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
If you liked this
David Copperfield for Dickens's most autobiographical novel. Bleak House for his most ambitious.