Great Expectations

Abstract

The novel in the genre of bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip and is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century. It contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death. When Pip goes to the cemetery to see his parents on Christmas Eve, he meets a fugitive convict, Magwitch, who scares him so that Pip steals a file and some food for him. Pip hides the whole event. When Magwitch is caught by the police, Magwitch does not reveal Pip and claims that he stole the file and the food himself. Later, Pip arrives at the house of Miss Havisham, a weird old virgin who wears a yellowed wedding dress and wants Pip to cheer her up and play with an equally old adopted girl named Estella. Pip falls in love with Estella, but she despises him for his social origin.