Great Expectations

by Dickens, Charles; Trotter, David; Mitchell, Charlotte

• ISBN13: 9780140434897
• ISBN10: 0140434895
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-04-01
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

"Great Expectations" is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mastery and a profound examination of moral values. Here, some of Dickens's most memorable characters come to play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shaped Dickens's searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class.

Author Biography

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.

David Trotter is Quain Professor of English Language at the University College London.

Charlotte Mitchell is lecturer in English at University College London.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii	(14)
David Trotter
A Dickens Chronology	xxi	(4)
Stephen Wall
Suggested Further Reading	xxv	(2)
A Note on the Text	xxvii	(2)
Map: Kent in the Early Nineteenth Century	xxix
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Volume I	1	(160)
Volume II	161	(164)
Volume III	325	(160)
Notes	485	(23)
Appendix A: The ending as originally conceived	508	(2)
Appendix B: Dickens's working notes	510