559 pages @350 words/page
First line:
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.
Great lines:
"You must know," said Estella, condescending to me as a beautiful woman might, "that I have no heart—if that has anything to do with my memory."
"I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death."
Best line about the novel:
All [Dickens's] books might be called "Great Expectations". But the only book to which he gave the name "Great Expectations" was the book in which the expectation was not met.
G.K. Chesterton
Chances are, you think of Charles Dickens in one of two opposite ways. As the writer, the very icon of the great and popular author for the masses, against whose work all subsequent.... more
It says something about the basic story line of Great Expectations, that no matter how many film adaptations are made (over a dozen so far), they are always engrossing. Each.... more
The greatest expectation to be destroyed in Great Expectations may be our assumption that the innocent lad at the centre of the story will turn out to be another David Copperfield or Oliver Twist. You know, overcoming an adverse childhood and the persecution of evildoers. Maintaining an innocent and rigid integrity. Eventually triumphing. All that.
But this is a unique Dickens novel. Fantastic and realistic by turns, with the realistic part showing how the "hero", young Pip, has his head turned by wealth. While other Dickens protagonists stay fiercely loyal to their family and oldest friends, Pip thinks to rise above his.
The most interesting thing about this is how he brings the reader along with him. Most of us probably guess, long before he does, that there is a problem with Pip's wealth. We even get a little squeamish about the compromises he makes and his condescension toward his lower-class loved ones. But nonetheless we continue to consider the delightful Pip—as no doubt we consider ourselves—to be a basically decent person. We invest in him as he makes his way up in the world.
So when Pip's illusions are finally shattered, we too feel shame for how he has behaved. What we had experienced as slight moral quibbles along the way are now felt with their full force as symptomatic of a life that is a complete sham.
It is remarkable that such a clear-eyed view of human nature should be a book that also features some of the most fantastic scenes Dickens ever wrote:
• The young boy's fateful care for the escaped convict Magwitch at the beginning (as you can see in the sample text of the first chapter).
• His introduction to the bizarre, old Miss Havisham, who in her rundown estate still wears the rags of the wedding dress she'd worn the day she was abandonned at the altar, and to her beautiful but cruel ward, Estella, who bewitches him.
• The climactic desperate chase on the river.
Dickens is often faulted for having melodramatic plots that conclude weakly, but this one is controlled and intriguing throughout. Finally the loose ends are tied up satisfyingly without the usual feeling one gets with Dickens that he's had to strain credibility, as well as several laws of both physics and psychology, to make it all fit together.
One's expectations of a typical Dickens novel may be disappointed here, but one ends up being greatly rewarded in other ways by Great Expectations, perhaps more than by any other Dickens novel.
— Eric
