Customer Reviews

Great Expectations (A Norton Critical Edition)

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Why do I come here to "review" this? It isn't anyone's book club selection, no. But tonight I want to talk about this incomparably rich and wonderful book, and how as a fourteen year old kid I simply sank into it, taking it slowly week by week, glorying in its mysteries, its great grotesque portrait of Miss Havisham in her rotting bridal finery, its often painful recounting of a young boy's awakening to a seductive world beyond the blacksmith's forge to which destiny has condemned him. This book was about me. It was about wanting to learn, wanting to transcend, wanting to achieve while anything and everything seems hopelessly beyond one's dreams. Of course life changes for Pip. And the world Pip enters was a world that dazzled me and only made my adolescent ambitions burn all the more hurtfully. I think this book is about all who've ever tried for more, ever reached for the gold ring -- and it's about some, of course, who've gotten it. It's also a wondrous piece of storytelling, a wondrous example of how in the first person ("I am, etc." ) a character can tell you more about himself than he himself knows. What a feat. And a very strange thing about this book, too, was the fact that Dickens said more about Pip and Pip's dreams than Dickens knew he was doing. Dickens himself didn't quite realize, I don't think, the full humanity of the character he created. Yet the character is there -- alive, captivating, engaging us throughout with full sympathy. Go for it. If you never read anything else by Charles Dickens, read and experience this book. Afterwards, David Copperfield will be a ride in the sunshine, I assure you. And both books will stand by you forever. For whom am I writing this? For myself perhaps just because Pip meant and still means so much. For some one perhaps who's unsure about this book and needs a push to dive into a classic. Oh, is this book ever worth the effort. -. Enough. Read it, know it.

The folks at Norton Critical Editions have once again put together an excellent book, with incredibly helpful notes and interesting articles to help readers understand and appreciate the text.

If you are going to buy some version of Great Expectations, buy this one.

The edition is excellent. However, the type face is much, much too small to make the book enjoyable to read.

Pip,a poor orphan boy living with his sister and her husband, who is the village blacksmith, wishes for the new world to live life of a gentlemen in. As if an answer to his wishes, Pips learns from Mr. Jagger that he has been given an enormous quantity of money from a secret benefctor, this money is enough to live the life of a wealthy gentlemen in London. There he stayes with Herbert Pockt. When he sees Estella the girl of his dreams, the adopted girl of the rich, Miss Havisham. To find out who his benefactor and what happenes with Estelaa you have to read this truely great story for it is called "Great" "Expectatons."

Pip, a mildly-abused and closeted homosexual boy raised "by hand" by his not-so-loving sister, is forever changed following a chance encounter with escaped convict Abel Magwitch. He survives the encounter and goes on to meet some of the most delightfully twisted characters in literary history, most notably Miss Havisham, who suffers from a horrible jilting coupled, one would presume, with a legendary case of B.O. Olefactory trauma aside, Pip manages to sustain a Platonic relationship with equally gay but not-so-deeply-closeted comrade Herbert Pocket as he pursues his dream of becoming a Gentleman. His dreams are...

...but, then, we wouldn't want to spoil it for the reader, would we? Let's just say that Pip endures. He endures (among other things) mishap, abuse, treachery, escape, an impromptu wedding, debt, bad Shakespearean acting and two maddeningly ambiguous alternate endings, but he emerges as one of the great heroes of 19th century literature, part of Dickens' great masterpiece, "masterpiece" being a bit lofty a word for a delightful book that can be enjoyed again and again until you are as old as Wemmick's aged parent himself.

Five stars!