Great Expectations - Charles Dickens Reviews

This novel was one of Dickens serialised works. He would write one or two chapters at a time which would then appear in the press. The novel took little under a year to complete. The narrator is Pip (Phillip Pirrip), whom is orphaned at a young age and taken in by his uncaring and abusive sister, Mrs Joe and her kind husband, Joe the ...  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 ...  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 ...  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 ...  Read the complete review

*** Introduction *** ?Great Expectations? is the novel by Dickens about Philip Pirrip?s life, with him as the leading character and the narrator, a life that without one sole benefactor would probably be the common and predictable experience that Pip himself was expecting. Although he desperately wanted to become much more than he ...  Read the complete review

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 ...  Read the complete review

I had never once in my life had any inclination to read Dickens. In all honesty I was really happy that I'd never had to read any at school or college, and more than slightly gutted when I was told I had to read some for uni. I was, however, in for a pleasant suprise. I could hardly put this book down, wondering what would happen next, even ...  Read the complete review

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Great Expectations opens unforgettably in a twilit and overgrown churchyard on the eerie Kent marshes. There the orphan Pip is disturbed to meet an escaped convict, Magwitch, but gives him food, in an encounter that is to haunt both their lives. How Pip receives riches from a mysterious ...  Read the complete review

This was the first ever Dickens novel I read and I must admit it is a hard act to follow. Dickens books were all originally written to be serialised in weekly parts, rather like the soap operas of today. Like soap operas he also had to put in little cliff-hangers at the end of each edition and this is one of the strengths of the book. You do not ...  Read the complete review

Endlessly filmed and refilmed, this is one of the most atmospheric and compelling books that I've read by Dickens. Very unusually for me, I read it over a weekend. Its easy to read and some of the more irritating digressions and ridiculousnesses of a lot of his other books are missing altogether. If you've seen David Lean's ...  Read the complete review

I've read Great Expectations many times I think its one of Charles Dickens best Novels he has ever written. I think that Great Expectations opens unforgettably in a twilit and overgrown churchyard on the eerie Kent marshes. In Great Expectations Charles Dickens blends the Gripping drama with penetrating satire to give a compelling ...  Read the complete review

I had to read this book for A' Level English Lit. Before going into detail about the book, I must explain a few things about Dickens, the man. Firstly, Dickens' father was imprisioned in one of the many Debtor's prisons for non-payment. This had a devastating effect on Dickens, and is often a theme in his books. Secondly, Dickens' ...  Read the complete review

This classic novel is compelling reading for all. Reaching deep into himself, Dickens created this novel of moral exploration, high comedy, and page-turning narrative power. Pip, an orphan raised by his bullying siter and her sweet-naured blacksmith husband, discovers one day that he has a mysterious benefactor. The good-hearted Pip suddenly has ...  Read the complete review

I had to read Great Expectetions for school, at first it seemed like the worst book ever written, it was boring, confusing, and seemingly pointless. But, of course that was before I finished it and fully understood what Dickens was tying to convey. the whole book is a mystery, only in the very end do you finally find everything out. Note: if you ...  Read the complete review

i really enjoyed reading this book. It is the only work by Dickens that I have read, and it certainly impressed me. The range of characters is brilliant, with each having a name to suit them, and well thought out behavioural traits which convince, while also being caricatures in many ways. The story is unpredictable, brilliantly thought out, and I ...  Read the complete review

I found this book hard to read and hard to comprehend. The book is about a boy named Pip and his rise from lowly to gentlemanly status. Along the way, he manages to alienate his friends and he learns some valuable lessons about friendship in the end. The way the sentences are written and structured made it difficult for me to understand everything ...  Read the complete review

This is the only Dicken's novel I have read,I am not sure why it hasn't inspired me to try others, since this is one of my favourite books. Phillip Pirrip (pip) is an orphan, who lives with his sharp tongued sister, and her not very bright husband Joe the blacksmith. Despite his sisters temper, Pip is fairly happy with his life, and ...  Read the complete review

I think this book is really good when you get into it, i hardly ever read books but i just love it how Pip gets just what he wants.... to be a gentleman. The way the author describes many certain things such as at the biggining with the escaped convict and how he walks, its great. Jaggers is also a great character he is described so well it is as ...  Read the complete review

Firstly, any book with a hero with a name that would be better suited to a dog (Pip), has an immediate head-start as far as I'm concerned. But back to the book.. It is very hard to sum up a Dickens novel as he is rather on the verbose side, but briefly, it's the story of a young unfortunate, Pip (a dimunitive form of ...  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 ...  Read the complete review