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About the BookAbout the Author

Great Expectations (1861), one of Dickens’s later novels is more mature and serious than his earlier works and less harsh and critical of Victorian society that Dickens is known to caricature. This novel, whose hero Pip is an orphan, reads more like a detective story. The story opens with little Pip meeting an escaped convict in the churchyard on a cold December evening in an almost surreal setting. As the story unfolds, we find Pip asked to wait upon a strange old lady, Miss Havisham, and becoming infatuated with her beautiful ward, Estella. Soon thereafter, Pip inherits a handsome property left to him by an unknown benefactor. He leaves for London, soon forgets his childhood friends and leads a life of leisure. After Pip’s twenty-fifth birthday, his benefactor makes himself known and Pip realises the irony of his good fortune. With the unravelling of his own position, Pip grows in moral stature. Great Expectations is the story of Pip’s coming of age.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was born at Landport near Portsmouth, England, where the happiest years of his childhood were spent. Her father’s financial difficulties forced him to work at a very early age which were the darkest years of his life. He was however able to return to school and at fifteen became a solicitor’s clerk and a parliamentary reporter. In his travels throughout England, he met many people, some of whom have been immortalised in his novels. Underlying the fun and humour and eccentric characters, is a deep sadness for the injustice and cruelty of the times that marks most of Dickens’s works.