Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Great Expectations was first published in a newspaper over a space of weeks. That’s while you’ll find in different chapters that it seems like Dickens is reminding you of the characters, because after a week, people forgot different characters. It’s an odd novel, because each character changes throughout it. You’d never think that someone you liked so much in the beginning could become someone you don’t like further on in the novel, or vice versa, but that actually happens often in the book with most characters. A story of a young boy from rags to riches has been read thousands of times in the century and a half it’s ...  Read the complete review

A brilliant read I especially found chapter one to be very vivid - thus my review is based upon that. The initial chapter is set in a churchyard of graves in the flat Essex marshes, through Pips narration we can envision the bleak threatening landscape. He uses a stream of negative adjectives such as "bleak", "dark" and "leaden" to portray how threatening the landscape is to him. The phrase "...dead and buried" details how the graveyard is inhabited by the dead meaning Pip feels isolated and alone. Pip depicts his location within a long periodic sentence of sixteen clauses, frequently punctuated with "and that". The ...  Read the complete review

My first experience of the Dickens classic Great Expectations was when I studied it at School as part of my English course. This basically entaled the entire book being read to us over the course of several lessons, with the occassional reading duty given out to a member of the class to give the teacher a break. This was a very disjointed way of reading the book as it not only did it take seemingly forever but also it was very hard to concentrate on being read to over the course of a double lesson which lasted one hour and ten minutes. That said, I found the actual plot of the story to be really quite good. Having read the book, we also watched one of the film versions, ...  Read the complete review

Have you ever wished you could be a high-flying executive, with money, respect and admiration showering down upon you? Have you ever had a crush on someone and wanted to impress them? Have you ever felt like your wings are clipped and you're not getting your chance to make an impression on the world? If so, you're just like Pip in Great Expectations. He is cared for by his strict sister and her gentle husband Joe, but becomes increasingly aware of his humble circumstances when he starts to visit the odd and rich Miss Havisham and the beautiful young girl Estella who lives with her. He hates how Estella looks down on him and wants to rise up in the world ...  Read the complete review

'Great Expectations' is one of the greatest books in the English language. Dickens has a knack in all of his novels for creating atmosphere and drawing the reader into the darkness of Dickensian England. This book becomes alive with Dickens' careful choice of language in creating characters to care for and an atmosphere that is both claustrophobic and tense. Estelle is a wonderful creation by Dickens. He makes us love and pity a stuck-up snob of a girl because he shows us her loneliness in the life she leads. Magwitch reverses all of our initial judgements and each character makes you feel something about them. ...  Read the complete review