Great Expectations

Great Expectations is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mystery and a profound examination of moral values. Written at a time when Dickens' relationship with Victorian society had reached a crisis, this novel is peopled by characters unmistakably bearing Dickens' familiar stamp—but here they appear in a new and questioning light. The orphan, Pip, and the convict, Magwitch...the beautiful Estella, and her guardian, the embittered and vengeful Miss Havisham.. .the strangely ambiguous figure of the master lawyer, Mr. Jaggers... all play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shapes Dickens' searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class. From the agony of his disenchantment comes a work that gives an added dimension to his matchless genius ".. .the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced. The only one perhaps that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Flaubert or Henry James makes of the novelist." —Angus Wilson