Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” lives up to your expectations. The gripping narrative is bound to keep your interested. It is one of the most interesting books I’ve read.

The beggining of Pip's expectations is his horrific ordeal at the hands of the convict Magwich who he made accquanitance with at the grave yard in which he threatened poor Pip with a terrible but contrived fate if he did not bring him food and a file "stay still you little devil, or ill cut your throat!" made on behalf of 'the fearful man', in which pip replied "O! dont cut my throat, sir," pleading for his life at the hands of the convict. In fear of the truthv of this threat made upon this man Pip

We all need our dreams. We have all fallen in love. Dickens's susceptible hero Pip believes that the 'star' of his dream is the beautiful Estella, because she had been granted to him by his fairy God-mother Miss Havisham, in a rare moment of compassion. Every turn of Pip's first person narration in the novel shouts 'No!' to his interpretation of the world and its tricksy words. Yet Pip's near fatal fallibility and misreading of his expectations humanises him and aligns his desperate romantic hopefulness to our own. Uneasily we admit our own private quests for love, and what a big love we crave after all!

'Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of my self. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here...You have been in every prospect I have ever seen...You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with....'

Pip's incantatory admission that love has engulfed his life is gloriously obsessive and bravely embarrassing. Like Carol Ann Duffy in Rapture: 'When did your name change from a proper noun to a charm?' Dickens's hero gives voice to love's piratical need to ambush all signs of the beloved and claim them greedily for oneself. Pip's 'wonder' in the light of his icy star Estella anticipates Gatsby's 'wonder' at Daisy's famous 'green light' in Fitzgerald's much later novel.

Read and be awed. We all love dangerously once!

Great Expectations starts of interestingly and we are introduced to the main character Pip. The book is considered as Dickens' own auto-biography and is very emotional at times. Very interesting, would fully recommend.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations is another classic tale of a poor young boy who gets a job as a companion the young niece of an eccentric and wealthy woman who was jilted at the altar. She has turned into a bitter old woman, still in her wedding dress who has poisoned the mind of her charge. The boy falls in love with the girl but she rejects him. Years pass and he obtains a secret benefactor who pays for him to go to a school and better himself. When he encounters the young woman again, the old feelings flare up, but will he win her heart? And who is his mysterious benefactor?

This is a very far-fetched tale, and it's rather depressing, yet I did enjoy it when I re-read it, years after having been forced to read it in school. It takes a while to begin to appreciate Dickens' long-windedness but it's worth the effort to try.