Great Expectations

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) is the most tightly made of his great novels and, for many readers, his finest — a first-person story, told by an older man looking back, of how a poor blacksmith's boy came into a mysterious fortune and very nearly lost his soul to it. Pip is raised on the bleak Kent marshes; a terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a churchyard begins a debt he will not understand for years; and when an anonymous benefactor lifts him into the life of a London gentleman, he learns to be ashamed of the plain, good people who loved him.

Around Pip stand some of the most unforgettable figures in English fiction: the gentle blacksmith Joe Gargery; the cold and beautiful Estella, raised to break men's hearts; Miss Havisham, who stopped every clock at the hour she was jilted and has worn her rotting wedding dress ever since; and Abel Magwitch, the hunted convict whose secret gratitude turns out to underwrite the whole respectable edifice of Pip's new life.

Read as a story, it is a superbly plotted mystery of money and identity, written in short, propulsive chapters for weekly serialization. Read more closely, it is a moral inquiry into the cost of gentility and the shame of forgetting where one came from — and one of the great studies in the English novel of a young man who has to lose his expectations before he can grow up. This edition prints the revised ending Dickens published, which closes on the famously ambiguous line, "I saw no shadow of another parting from her."

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1861 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.