Great Expectations (Vintage Classics)

Author: Charles Dickens; F. W. Pailthorpe (Illustrator)

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $14.99 AUD
  • : 9780099511571
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Arrow
  • : January 2008
  • : 200mm X 131mm X 33mm
  • : January 2018
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Charles Dickens; F. W. Pailthorpe (Illustrator)
  • : Vintage Classics Ser.
  • : Paperback
  • : 8-Mar
  • :
  • : English
  • : very good
  • :
  • : 512
  • : General & literary fiction; Classic fiction
  • : b/w illust
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Barcode 9780099511571
9780099511571

Description

Great ExpectationsBy Charles DickensIn an overgrown churchyard, a grizzled convict springs upon an orphan boy named Pip. The convict terrifies Pip and threatens to kill him unless the boy helps further his escape. Later, Pip finds himself in a ruined garden where he meets the embittered and crazy Miss Havisham and her foster child, Estella, with whom he instantly falls in love. After a secret benefactor gives him a fortune, Pip moves to London, where he cultivates great expectations for a life that would allow him to discard his impoverished beginnings and socialize with members of the idle upper class. As Pip struggles to become a gentleman, he slowly learns the truth about himself and his illusions, and is tormented endlessly by the beautiful Estella. Written in the last decade of Dickens's life, Great Expectations reveals the author's dark attitudes toward Victorian society, its inherent class structure, and its materialism. Yet it persists as one of Dickens's most popular novels. Richly comic and immensely readable, Great Expectations is a tapestry woven of vividly drawn characters, moral maelstroms, and the sorrow and pity of love.

Promotion info

'In the little world in which children have their existence, whosever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice' Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Author description

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Landport in Portsmouth. When he was twelve years old he was sent to work in a shoe polish factory because his father had been imprisoned for debt. The Pickwick Papers, his first commercial success, was published in 1836, the same year that he married Catherine Hogarth. The serialisation of Oliver Twist began in 1837 while The Pickwick Papers was still running. Dickens became a celebrity in America as well as Britain. He set up and edited the journals Household Words (1850-9) and All the Year Round (1859-70). Charles Dickens died on 9 June 1870 leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.