Great Expectations
Great Expectations follows Pip, an orphan raised by his harsh sister in the bleak marsh country of Kent. As a boy he encounters an escaped convict among the graves and is forced to steal food and a file for him. Soon after, Pip is summoned to the decaying home of the eccentric Miss Havisham, where he falls hopelessly in love with the cold, beautiful Estella. When a mysterious benefactor grants him a fortune, Pip leaves the forge for London to become a gentleman, only to discover that the source of his "great expectations" is not what he imagined.
Dickens turns Pip's rise and disillusionment into a searching study of social class, ambition, guilt, and the difference between worldly status and genuine worth. Through memorable figures like the kindly blacksmith Joe and the ruined Miss Havisham, the novel exposes how money and snobbery corrode loyalty and self-knowledge. Both comic and deeply moving, it endures as Dickens's most personal meditation on what it truly means to grow up.
How it begins
M y father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “ Also Georgiana Wife of the Above ,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.