The cover of the ReadingRate edition of Great Expectations

ReadingRate edition

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens, 1861

739 pages · 184,582 words · about 12 hours · regard 92 of 100

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Pip, an orphan raised by his brutal sister and her gentle blacksmith husband Joe, has his life transformed by two encounters: with an escaped convict on the marshes and with the decayed gentlewoman Miss Havisham and her beautiful ward Estella. When a mysterious benefactor gives him "great expectations," Pip assumes Miss Havisham is behind his fortune and abandons Joe for London society. Dickens traces how money corrupts, how snobbery isolates, and how the people who truly love us are often the ones we neglect. The novel is Dickens at his most controlled: first-person narration that allows psychological depth, atmosphere that functions as meaning (the marshes, Miss Havisham's stopped clocks), and a plot that turns on shame and gratitude. The ending was famously revised; both versions leave Pip chastened.

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