Great expectations
By: With an intro. by Mary M. Threapleton
Series: An Airmont Classic, CL68
Publisher: Airmont Pub. Co.
Published: 1965
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Number of pages: 383
Description: Great Expectations is remarkable for its sym- bolic use of setting. The hostile world of the cold and lonely marshes is an apt background for the meeting Of the lonely child and the outcast convict, both of whom have found the world hostile. Satis House, with its decay and its stopped clocks, represents not only the stopped world of Miss Havisham, and the corruption that Estella undergoes there, but also the corruption that the genteel world will bring to Pip. Mr. Jaggers' office, full of re- minders of the criminal world, is Mr. Jaggers' life. Wal- worth is Wemmick's castle, not only because it has tur- rets and a drawbridge, but because it is his individuality, his humanity, which must be preserved and defended against the world of his employer and Little Britain.

Great Expectations is perhaps Dickens' master- piece. The structure is skillful, the irony brilliant, and the theme sustained. The hero, unlike his earlier counter- parts, is no pasteboard figure, but a fallible human being in Search of his identity. The comedy is less grotesque and the pathos less sentimental than in the earlier novels. In its exploration of guilt, the book anticipates a very modern theme. It may well turn out to be the most en- during, for the fastidious reader, of all the works of Dickens.