Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Published 1861 · 564 pages · 184,460 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Coming-of-Age, Literary Fiction, Victorian Literature

How hard is Great Expectations to read?

Great Expectations scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Victorian vocabulary but Dickens writes for broad audience. Some period-specific legal and social terms.
Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
More streamlined than earlier Dickens. First-person narration creates consistent, readable voice.
Abstraction: 45 out of 100
Concrete storytelling with moral themes emerging from action. Less discursive than Eliot.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Dense with character and incident but the linear plot makes it manageable.
Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
First-person retrospective. Some mysteries about identity resolved through plot.
Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
Miss Havisham's room, the marshes, the forge—powerful symbols that work through atmosphere.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Older Pip narrates younger Pip's delusions with rueful self-awareness.
Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
All mysteries resolved. The revised ending is more ambiguous than the original.
Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
Three-stage structure clearly organized. Tighter than many Dickens novels.

How Great Expectations is regarded

Great Expectations holds a literary regard score of 92 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Great Expectations sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (354 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Great Expectations scores 62 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
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.
Symbol: Formal
It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night
Mythos: Tragic Irony (Irony and Satire, phase 4) (irony iv)
I was so doubtful of myself now, and put so much trust in him, that I could not satisfy myself whether I ought to refer to it when he did not.
Genre: Novel + Confession
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.

Where the story of Great Expectations takes place

  • Kentish marshes and market town, early 19th century (1812 to 1840), the main setting
  • London: Little Britain, Barnard's Inn, the Temple, the Thames, early 19th century (1820 to 1845)

6 things that are true of Great Expectations, with the passage for each

  1. The story opens with a convict springing from among the graves of Pip's parents and five infant brothers.

    “Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch.

  2. Miss Havisham's watch and clocks are all stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

    I took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

  3. Jaggers announces Pip's 'great expectations' in the kitchen parlour at the Forge.

    And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.

  4. The convict Magwitch discloses that he, not Miss Havisham, is Pip's benefactor.

    “Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it!

  5. Miss Havisham's bridal dress catches fire and Pip burns his hands saving her.

    I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same moment I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her

  6. Joe settles his debts in secret, leaving Pip a note and a receipt.

    “Not wishful to intrude I have departured fur you are well again dear Pip and will do better without JO.

Scenes in Great Expectations that Frye would name

26 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
“Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it! The pivotal recognition: the patron is the convict, not Miss Havisham, and Pip's expectations collapse.
Pathos, untitled
Then, he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back, and passed away, and his head dropped quietly on his breast. Magwitch's death after Pip's disclosure that his daughter lives is the sacrificial scene.
Alazon, untitled
“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand.” Pumblechook is the blustering impostor who later claims credit for Pip's fortune.
Hamartia, untitled
It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. Pip's snobbish shame of Joe and the forge is the fatal flaw driving his fall.
Sparagmos, untitled
I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her, and soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high. Miss Havisham burns in her bridal dress, a demonic spectacle of bodily destruction.
Anagnorisis, untitled
“I know I am quite myself. And the man we have in hiding down the river, is Estella’s Father.” Pip discovers Estella's parentage, a second pivotal recognition.

Books that share these scenes with Great Expectations

About the author

Charles Dickens