Great Expectations

Author: Dickens, Charles

Brand: Signet

Color: Multicolor

Edition: Reissue

Binding: mass_market

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 528

Release Date: 03-02-2009

Part Number: 9780451531186

Details: Product Description
From the agony of Charles Dickens’ disenchantment with the Victorian middle class comes a novel of spellbinding mystery and a profound examination of moral values.An orphan living with his older sister and her kindly husband, Pip is hired by wealthy and embittered Miss Havisham as a companion for her and her beautiful adopted daughter, Estella. His years in service to the Havishams fill his heart with the desire to rise above his station in life. Pip’s wish is fulfilled when a mysterious benefactor provides him with “great expectations”—the means to be tutored as a gentleman.

Thrust into London’s high-society circles, Pip grows accustomed to a life of leisure, only to find himself lacking as a suitor competing for Estella’s favor. After callously discarding everything he once valued for his own selfish pursuits, Pip learns the identity of his patron—a revelation that shatters his very soul.


With an Introduction by Stanley Weintrauband an Afterword by Annabel Davis-Goff
 
Review
"No story in the first person was ever better told."
About the Author
As a child,
Charles Dickens (1812–70) came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A surprise legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of
Sketches by Boz (1836) and
The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success through
Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.
 

Stanley Weintraub is the author or editor of more than fifty books of biography, culture history, and military history, including
The London Yankees,
Whistler,
Victoria, and
Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert. He retired from Pennsylvania State University as Evan Hugh Professor Emeritus and director of Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies.
 

Annabel Davis-Goff is the author of
The Dower House, This Cold Country, and
The Fox’s Walk. All three novels were selected by the
New York Times as Notable Books. She is also the author of
Walled Gardens, a family memoir, and is
editor of
The Literary Companion to Gambling. She now teaches literature at Bennington College.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter I.


My 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. To
five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were
arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of
five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly
early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in
their trousers-pockets, and ha

EAN: 9780451531186

Package Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 0.4 inches

Languages: English