From the Archives: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens first posted on 2/26/2016

When I began my book blog I wanted to include some of the great writers I had never read before and so book ten in my fifty book reading challenge is Great Expectatiins by Charles Dickens.

Great Expectations is narrated by Pip (Phillip Pirrup).  The year is about 1860 and Pip is telling us about his younger days in the early 1800's.  We learn about his life growing up an orphan in a small village in Kent raised by his sister and her kind hearted husband Joe Gargery.  Thanks to an annonymous benefactor, Pip is able to leave his village and arrive in London with a generous allowance and aquire new friends, lodgings, culture etc.  It's an opportunity to move to a higher station in life and Pip to quote the title of the book has great expectations.

Pip's tone though throughout the novel is tinged with melancholy and we sense early that this is a cautionary tale.  Pip introduces us to other characters who influence his life for good or ill. The escaped convict Abel Magwitch, the reclusive spinster Miss Havisham, her adopted daughter Estella, Pip's best friend Herbert.  As for Pip he makes mistakes but most of what happens to him in the novel is a byproduct of the bad choices and bad luck that have happened to others.  The case of Miss Havisham for example who cannot forgive her fiance walking out on their wedding day 30 years ago.  We see how the inability to move on can corrode one's own life but also the lives of everyone around you. 

As for Pip he has tbe ability to forgive and still care for others.  That is impressive.  He would have reason for example to blame Miss Havisham for ruining his chance at happiness but he doesn't.  Possibly Dickens is telling us that class and good character were inate in Pip all along.  He didn't need to go to London to become a gentleman.  He learned that from his brother-in-law who raised him. 

Great Expectations has taken me a month to read and though I didn't leave ready to jump into another Dickens novel (at least not right away) I did leave with a curiousity about the man himself since many of Dickens' novels  have an autobiographical aspect to them.  Dickens wrote about the poor, being in debt, children, prisons, workhouses and he knew about all this first hand growing up.  Critics regard him as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age and so now if anyone asks if I ever read Charles Dickens I can say, yes, I have read Great Expectations.