Great Expectations

One of Dickens’s finest novels, Great Expectations chronicles the fortunes of its young protagonist Pip as he is unexpectedly endowed by a mysterious benefactor with the life of a gentleman, enabling him to escape to London from the prospect of a humble blacksmith’s career in rural Kent. In the bustling, unforgiving capital he must learn for himself the pitfalls of love and wealth, and how to sort his friends from his enemies.

Through the lives of its unforgettable and iconic characters – such as Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella – Great Expectations charts the course of an England undergoing rapid social and economic change, and tells a tale that is among the foremost classics of the English language.

‘All his characters are my personal friends – I am constantly comparing them with living persons, and living persons with them.’ Leo Tolstoy

‘Dickens’s figures belong to poetry, like figures of Dante or Shakespeare, in that a single phrase, either by them or about them, may be enough to set them wholly before us.’ T.S. Eliot

320 pp.