Great Expectations (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) FROM OUR EDITORS
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FROM THE PUBLISHER
Great Expectations, described by G. K. Chesterton as a
“study in human weakness and the slow human surrender,” may
be called Charles Dickens’s finest moment in a remarkably
illustrious literary career.
In an overgrown churchyard, a grizzled convict springs upon an orphan
named Pip. The convict terrifies the young boy and threatens to kill him
unless Pip helps further his escape. Later, Pip finds himself in the
ruined garden where he meets the bitter and crazy Miss Havisham and her
foster child Estella, with whom he immediately falls in love. After a
secret benefactor gives him a fortune, Pip moves to London, where he
cultivates great expectations for a life which would allow him to discard
his impoverished beginnings and socialize with the idle upper class. As
Pip struggles to become a gentleman and is tormented endlessly by the
beautiful Estella, he slowly learns the truth about himself and his
illusions.
Written in the last decade of his life, Great Expectations
reveals Dickens’s dark attitudes toward Victorian society, its
inherent class structure, and its materialism. Yet this novel persists as
one of Dickens’s most popular. Richly comic and immensely readable,
Great Expectations overspills with vividly drawn characters, moral
maelstroms, and the sorrow and pity of love.
Introduction and Notes by Radhika Jones
“Pip’s eagerness to embrace his
‘Expectations’—the package deal designed by a secret
benefactor to set him up as a London gentleman—goes hand in hand
with his eagerness to shed the blacksmith’s apprenticeship and
country connections that he feels have kept him down in the world. To
look back, once he has magically obtained the means to go forward, would
be to acknowledge his origins—the very act from which his
expectations are to free him. Pip’s frequent backward glances in
narrative mode thus highlight a tension central to Dickens’s plot.
What these great expectations ultimately do, of course, is to send Pip
right back to his story’s beginning, to the stolen file and pork
pie that bind his fate to that of a convict.” —from the
Introduction by Radhika Jones
The managing editor of Grand Street magazine and a freelance
writer, Radhika Jones is also a doctoral candidate in English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, into a family
burdened with financial troubles. Despite his deprived beginnings,
however, he achieved national renown upon the publication of his first
novel, The Pickwick Papers. His early novels Oliver Twist,
Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and A
Christmas Carol solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. When
Dickens was in his late thirties, his social criticism became biting, his
humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still. David
Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two
Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend are
the great works of his masterful and prolific later period.