Great Expectations

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by English author Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. The novel is a bildungsroman and depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman & Hall published the novel in three volumes.

The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery—poverty, prison ships, chains, and fights to the death—and features a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe Gargery, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular with both readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.

The novel was very widely praised. Although Dickens's contemporary Thomas Carlyle referred to it disparagingly as "that Pip nonsense", he nevertheless reacted to each fresh instalment with "roars of laughter". Later, George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, describing it as "all of one piece and consistently truthful". During the serial publication, Dickens was pleased with public response to Great Expectations and its sales; when he first conceived the plot, he called it "a very fine, new and grotesque idea". In the 21st century, the novel retains good standing among literary critics and in 2003 it was ranked 17th in the BBC's The Big Read poll.

The book includes three "stages" of Pip's expectations.

Philip "Pip" Pirrip is a seven-year-old orphan who lives with his hot-tempered older sister and her kindly blacksmith husband Joe Gargery on the coastal marshes of Kent. On Christmas Eve 1812, Pip visits the graves of his parents and siblings. There, he unexpectedly encounters an escaped convict who threatens to kill him if he does not bring back food and tools. Pip steals a file from among Joe's tools and a pie and brandy meant for Christmas dinner, which he delivers to the convict.

That evening, Pip's sister is about to look for the missing pie when soldiers arrive and ask Joe to mend some shackles. Joe and Pip accompany them into the marshes to recapture the convict, who is fighting with another escaped convict with a scar on his face. The first convict confesses to stealing food, clearing Pip.

A few years later, Miss Havisham, a wealthy and reclusive spinster who lives in the dilapidated Satis House, still wearing her old wedding dress after having been jilted at the altar, asks Mr Pumblechook, a relative of the Gargerys, to find a boy to visit her. Pip visits Miss Havisham and falls in love with Estella, her adopted daughter. Estella is aloof and hostile to Pip, a trait encouraged by Miss Havisham. During one visit, another boy invites Pip to a fist fight, where Pip easily gains the upper hand. Estella watches and allows Pip to kiss her afterwards. Pip visits Miss Havisham regularly until he is old enough to learn a trade.

Joe accompanies Pip during the last visit to Miss Havisham, and she gives Pip money to become an apprentice blacksmith. Joe's surly assistant, Dolge Orlick, is envious of Pip and dislikes Mrs Joe. Orlick complains when Joe says he needs to take Pip somewhere at midday, thinking this is another sign of favouritism; Joe assures him he can quit work for the day. When Pip and Joe are away from the house, Joe's wife is brutally attacked, leaving her unable to speak or work. When Pip sees a leg iron, the weapon used in the attack, he becomes worried, believing it was the same leg iron he helped liberate the convict from. Now bedridden, Mrs Joe cannot be as "rampaging" towards Pip as before the attack. Pip's former schoolmate Biddy joins the household to help with her care.