Book Review: Great Expectations

Book: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Description:

In an overgrown churchyard, a grizzled convict springs upon an orphan named Pip. The convict terrifies the young boy and threatens to kill him unless Pip helps further his escape. Later, Pip finds himself in the ruined garden where he meets the bitter and crazy Miss Havisham and her foster child Estella, with whom he immediately falls in love. After a secret benefactor gives him a fortune, Pip moves to London, where he cultivates great expectations for a life which would allow him to discard his impoverished beginnings and socialize with the idle upper class. As Pip struggles to become a gentleman and is tormented endlessly by the beautiful Estella, he slowly learns the truth about himself and his illusions.

Written in the last decade of his life, Great Expectations reveals Dickens’s dark attitudes toward Victorian society, its inherent class structure, and its materialism. Yet this novel persists as one of Dickens’s most popular. Richly comic and immensely readable, Great Expectations overspills with vividly drawn characters, moral maelstroms, and the sorrow and pity of love.



Rating: 3 1/2 stars

Review:

It is hard to put into words what I thought of this book. There was so much going on in this story and there was also a lot of suffering for the main character Pip, with some being of his own doing. There were scenes in this story which felt as if they had gone on for longer than necessary. I thought there were a lot of likeable characters and the interesting part was somehow their lives all seemed to intersect and tie in to the main story. This may not be one of my favorite books but I did like it, even though it just felt so tragic and sad. Perhaps that was the point of the story.

It's hard not to feel sorry for Pip when he was a little boy. He had to deal with the constant verbal abuse from not only his sister and his boastful uncle but also from other friends of the family and receiving little help from his equally downtrodden brother-in-law, Joe. And he was also scared by a stranger he met in the cemetery on Christmas day while he went to visit his parents' graves. Nothing seemed to go well for Pip.

However, his life did change when he was given an opportunity to visit the town's wealthy recluse, Ms. Havisham. In visiting her, Pip met the lady's adopted daughter Estella (whom Pip falls in love with) and met a strange young man (who would later become his good friend).

After his first visit, Pip started to see his life as boring and ordinary. He hated how common and coarse he was compared to Estella and Ms. Havisham. He wanted to be more, he wanted to be a gentleman. Pip became unappreciative of the life he currently had which can be understandable with a sister who constantly treats him as if he is the cause of all her problems. Some years later after becoming Joe's apprentice did an opportunity occur for Pip to realize his dreams of becoming more by having acquired an anonymous benefactor. You could see the change in Pip immediately, his views on his brother-in-law Joe changed as well as how he treated his friend Biddy. It was as if he thought he was better than everyone in the small town but it was also how the townspeople started to treat him of some importance when they would of usually ignored him. Pip later leaves for London to start his new life and to begin his studies.

Pip's life did change while he was in London and it felt as if he was going out of his way to distance himself from his old life. As an adult he made a lot of bad decisions about money and love. For the life of me, I just can't understand why Pip was so enthralled by Estella other than her beauty she wasn't very nice to him. Yet that didn't stop him from making a fool of himself trying to court her.

By the end of the story Pip's life started to change again and it took finding out the identity of his benefactor and an illness for him to realize the good things he has in his life. The interesting thing was that Pip didn't get the perfect life in the end but he did get a life that he found enjoyable.

I found Great Expectations to be wordy yet interesting. There were parts I enjoyed and parts I wished I could have skimmed through but I didn't because I thought I just might miss something if I did. I think this would have been so much better if it had been condensed and cut out the things that didn't seem to go anywhere.