Great Expectations
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman; a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and l
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A young orphan named Pip helps an escaped convict on the marshes and is later told he has a secret benefactor sending him to London to be made a gentleman. He assumes he knows who. He is mostly wrong.
Great Expectations is one of Dickens's more accessible long novels, with a tighter plot than Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. Most readers find the first-person voice and coming-of-age structure inviting once they adjust to Victorian sentence length.
Yes. Great Expectations was serialized from 1860 to 1861 and is in the public domain. Free editions are available legally through Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, and similar archives.
Great Expectations was written by Charles Dickens, published in 1861 by Independently published.
Great Expectations is 482 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Great Expectations takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Great Expectations is a standalone novel by Charles Dickens, not part of a series.
Great Expectations is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.