Great Expectations

A boy in a churchyard, a terrifying convict, a decaying house where the clocks have stopped: Great Expectations begins with one of the most famous openings in English fiction and grows into a story about money, class, love and the cost of wanting to be someone else.

Pip is an orphan raised in a Kent village by his sharp-tongued sister and her kind husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. When an unknown benefactor gives him the means to become a gentleman, he leaves the forge for London, convinced he knows who has been generous and why. What he learns about his fortune, about the proud Estella and the strange Miss Havisham, and about the people he has left behind changes his understanding of himself.

Dickens wrote the novel late in his career, and it shows both his comic invention and his moral seriousness. Readers who enjoy Victorian fiction, coming-of-age stories, mysteries with a slow reveal and characters who stay with you will find much here. It is also a rewarding book for discussion, because its narrator is not always honest with himself.

This edition contains the complete text of the novel in fifty-nine chapters, a new introduction for first-time readers, a guide to the principal characters, a summary of the story, a discussion of its main themes, a glossary of period and dialect words, and questions for reading groups and students.