The novel in which Dickens perfected everything he knew — and in which everything Pip believes turns out to be wrong. This Erato Press critical edition reads Great Expectations as the coldest, the most precisely engineered, and the most morally unforgiving novel Dickens ever wrote.
Published weekly in All the Year Round between 1860 and 1861, Great Expectations is the Bildungsroman inverted. The young hero acquires wealth, manners, education, and a gentleman’s wardrobe — and every acquisition makes him worse. The benefactor he imagines is not who he thinks. The woman he loves was manufactured to be incapable of love. The gentleman he aspires to become is a figure whose elegance is purchased by the labour and suffering of someone he is ashamed to acknowledge. The novel’s architecture is a machine for producing recognition: the reader watches Pip acquire his expectations with mounting unease, knowing before Pip does that the gentleman’s illusion will cost him everything that actually mattered.
At its centre are two of the most extraordinary figures in English fiction. Miss Havisham, jilted on her wedding day, has stopped every clock in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine, left her wedding cake to rot on the table, and raised an orphan girl as an instrument of vengeance against men. Estella, that orphan, has been trained from childhood to attract and destroy — and Pip, who sees all this clearly, loves her anyway. The result is one of the darkest love stories in the language: a man who cannot stop wanting the woman who was built to make wanting futile.
Pip — the narrator who tells the story of his own delusion with the unflinching honesty of a man who has survived his own shame Estella — the woman manufactured to break hearts, whose tragedy is not that she is cruel but that cruelty is the only thing she was taught Miss Havisham — the bride in the rotting dress, the stopped clocks, the decaying cake: arrested time made flesh, one of the most indelible images in English fiction Abel Magwitch — the convict whose secret generosity is the novel’s moral engine and whose return is its greatest shock Joe Gargery — the blacksmith whom Pip abandons and who forgives him, the moral centre the novel keeps returning to
✦ The complete, unabridged text of Great Expectations (1861)
This edition also includes: ✦ The Gentleman’s Illusion — a critical essay in thirteen sections examining the inverted Bildungsroman, Pip’s shame and its cost, Miss Havisham and arrested time, Estella as victim and instrument, Magwitch’s return and the novel’s moral economy, the first-person voice, the composition under weekly serialisation pressure, and why the novel remains the most precisely engineered plot Dickens ever built ✦ Charles Dickens (1812–1870) — a full author biography in nine sections
For readers who enjoy: ✦ The great Victorian novel at its most morally complex ✦ Dark romance and the literature of impossible love ✦ Coming-of-age fiction that punishes its hero for growing up wrong ✦ Literary criticism that reveals the machinery inside a masterpiece
“The expectations were great. They were also, in every way that mattered, wrong.”
