Great Expectations

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by the English author Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, and it depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip.

It is the second of Dickens's novels, after David Copperfield, to be narrated entirely in the first person. The book first appeared as a serial in his weekly periodical All the Year Round, running from 1 December 1860 to August 1861, and it was published in three volumes in October 1861.

The story is set in Kent and London in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, and it begins in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. That encounter sets going everything that follows.

The novel is full of extreme imagery, including poverty, prison ships, chains and fights to the death, and its cast includes the eccentric Miss Havisham, the cold and beautiful Estella and the blacksmith Joe Gargery, all of whom have entered popular culture.