Great Expectations / Edition 1

by Charles Dickens, Graham Law, Adrian J. Pinnington

Overview

“Law and Pinnington have put together an edition that takes into account what the contemporary (and especially, the non-British) reader needs in order to appreciate the novel. All in all, this is an excellent edition.” — Sally Mitchell, Temple University

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551111742
Publisher:	Broadview Press
Publication date:	04/07/1998
Series:	Literary Texts Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

The iconic and much-loved Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, though he spent much of his life in Kent and London. A prolific writer, Dickens kept up a career in journalism as well as writing short stories and novels, with much of his work being serialised before being published as books. He gave a view of contemporary England with a strong sense of realism, yet instilled his stories with a sense of charm, fantastic characters and humour like no other.

Judith John is a writer and editor specializing in literature and history. A former secondary school English Language and Literature teacher, she has subsequently worked as an editor on major educational projects, including English A: Literature for the Pearson International Baccalaureate series. Judith’s major research interests include Romantic and Gothic literature, and Renaissance drama.

Date of Birth:

February 7, 1812

Date of Death:

June 18, 1870

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, England

Place of Death:

Gad's Hill, Kent, England

Education:

Home-schooling; attended Dame School at Chatham briefly and Wellington

Read an Excerpt

Chapter I.


My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my
infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than
Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.


I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone
and my sister – Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw
my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for
their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies
regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their
tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea
that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the
character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,"
I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To
five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were
arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of
five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly
early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in
their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence.


Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within as the river wound,
twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the
identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw
afternoon towards evening. At such a time Ifound out for certain, that
this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip
Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were
dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and
Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and
that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes
and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes;
and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant
savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the
small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was
Pip.


"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among
the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil,
or I'll cut your throat!"


A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with
no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A
man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by
stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who
limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in
his head as he seized me by the chin.


"Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it,
sir."


"Tell us your name!" said the man. "Quick!"


"Pip, sir."


"Once more," said the man, staring at me. "Give it mouth!"


From the Paperback edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
Charles Dickens: A Brief Chronology

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

• Volume I
• Volume II
• Volume III

Explanatory Notes

Appendices: Contemporary Documents

Appendix A. The Composition of the Novel

1. Dickens’s Working Memoranda
2. Dickens’s Letters

Appendix B. Contemporary Responses to the Novel

1. Athenaeum (13 July 1861)
2. Examiner (20 July 1861)
3. Saturday Review (20 July 1861)
4. Atlantic Monday (September 1861)
5. The Times (17 October 1861)
6. British Quarterly Review (January 1862)
7. Rambler (January 1862)
8. Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1862)
9. Temple Bar (September 1862)

Appendix C. On Class and Language

1. Charles Dickens, “Hard Experiences in Boyhood” in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74)
2. Charles Dickens, “Travelling Abroad” The Uncommercial Traveller (1861)
3. Alexis deTocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856)
4. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, “Gentlemen” Cornhill Magazine (1862)
5. William Sewell, “Gentlemanly Manners” Sermons to Boys at Radley School (1854-69)
6. John Ruskin, “Of Vulgarity,” Modern Painters (1860)
7. J.H. Newman, “Liberal Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion,” The Scope and Nature of University Education (1859)
8. Thomas Carlyle, “Labour,” Past and Present (1843)
9. Samuel Smiles, “Character: The True Gentleman,” Self Help (1859)
10. Mrs. Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856)
11. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857)
12. Reports on the State of Popular Education in England (1861)

Appendix D. On Crime & Punishment

1. Mrs. Trimmer, The Charity School Spelling Book (1818)
2. Charles Dickens, “Criminal Courts,” Sketches by Boz (1839)
3. Charles Dickens, “A Visit to Newgate,” Sketches by Boz (1839)
4. Report from the Select Committee on Transportation (1838)
5. Henry Savery, Quintus Servinton (1830-31)
6. Marcus Clarke, His Natural Life (1870-72)
7. “The Autobiography of a Convict,” The Voices of Our Exiles (1854)
8. John Binny, “Thieves and Swindlers,” in London Labour and the London Poor (1861)
9. Thomas Carlyle, Model Prisons (1850)
10. Thomas Beard, “A Dialogue Concerning Convicts,” All the Year Round (1861)
11. Charles Dickens, “The Ruffian,” The Uncommercial Traveller (1868)

Maps and Illustrations Showing Settings

Map A: Estuaries of the Thames and Medway
Map B: City of London
Map C: Pip’s London
Illustration A. Smithfield Market
Illustration B. Barnard’s Inn
Illustration C. The River Front at Hammersmith
Illustration D. Covent Garden Market
Illustration E. The Royal Exchange
Illustration F. The Temple Stairs
Illustration G. London Bridge
Illustration H. Billingsgate Market

Select Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

George Gissing

Observe how finely the narrative is kept in one key. It begins with a mournful impession—the foggy marshes spreading drearily by the seaward Thames—and throughout recurs this effect of cold and damp and dreariness; in that kind Dickens never did anything so good.... No story in the first person was ever better told.

From the Publisher

"Dickens's figures belong to poetry, like figures of Dante or Shakespeare, in that a single phrase, either by them or about them, may be enough to set them wholely before us."  —T.S. Eliot

"All his characters are my personal friends—I am constantly comparing them with living persons, and living persons with them."  —Tolstoy

"Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did."  —George Orwell

John Irving

Great Expectations is the first novel I read that made me wish I had written it; it is the novel that made me want to be a novelist—specifically, to move a reader as I was moved then. I believe that Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language; at the same time, it never deviates from its intention to move you to laugher and tears.

Reading Group Guide

Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations between his terrifying experience in a graveyard with a convict named Magwitch and his humiliating visits with the eccentric Miss Havisham's beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, who torments him until he is elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can't buy. Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language, according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, Great Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens's abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

The notes to this edition of Great Expectations are extremely helpful, and the supporting materials are useful, clear, and well-selected. Law and Pinnington have put together an edition that takes into account what the contemporary (and especially, the non-British) reader needs in order to appreciate the novel. All in all, this is an excellent edition.” — Sally Mitchell, Temple University

“It is high time for this Dickens masterpiece to receive the kind of critical and contextual attention that this edition of Great Expectations affords. The editors provide essential information about Dickens’s compositional as well as publishing practices, and they further support this background with a sampling of the lively contemporary dialogue about the text in the periodicals of the day. They issues raised by the novel—namely class and language, and crime and punishment—are amply explored by pertinent historical documentation, including highly-charged autobiographical writing by Dickens himself that was not available to his contemporary readership. Moreover, the introduction expertly guides the reader though the application of these materials in a creative and inviting manner. Law and Pinnington have gathered together an impressive array of contemporary documents to promote an informed reading of this classic text … In particular, the maps and illustrations of the novel’s various settings allow the non-expert to quickly gain insights which should lead to intriguing arguments about how the novel has worked—for its own time as well as our own. I especially commend the editors for their resourceful choices related to the Victorian conception of what constitutes a true gentleman—itself perhaps the key question that helps to unlock the novel.” — Carol Hanbery MacKay, University of Texas-Austin

From the Publisher

"It is high time for this Dickens masterpiece to receive the kind of critical and contextual attention that this edition of Great Expectations affords. The editors provide essential information about Dickens's compositional as well as publishing practices, and they further support this background with a sampling of the lively contemporary dialogue about the text in the periodicals of the day. They issues raised by the novel—namely class and language, and crime and punishment—are amply explored by pertinent historical documentation, including highly-charged autobiographical writing by Dickens himself that was not available to his contemporary readership. Moreover, the introduction expertly guides the reader though the application of these materials in a creative and inviting manner. Law and Pinnington have gathered together an impressive array of contemporary documents to promote an informed reading of this classic text...In particular, the maps and illustrations of the novel's various settings allow the non-expert to quickly gain insights which should lead to intriguing arguments about how the novel has worked—for its own time as well as our own. I especially commend the editors for their resourceful choices related to the Victorian conception of what constitutes a true gentleman—itself perhaps the key question that helps to unlock the novel."

Carol Hanbery MacKay University of Texas - Austin

The notes to this edition of Great Expectations are extremely helpful, and the supporting materials are useful, clear, and well-selected. Law and Pinnington have put together an edition that takes into account what the contemporary (and especially, the non-British) reader needs in order to appreciate the novel. All in all, this is an excellent edition.”

Sally Mitchell Temple University

Mr. Dickens may be reasonably proud of these volumes.... he has written a story that is new, original, powerful and very entertaining.... It is in his best vein, and although it is too slight, and bears many traces of hasty writing, it is quite worthy to stand beside Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield.
—July 20, 1861

Saturday Review

Returning to print after more than a decade, this first volume in the relaunch of the Classics Illustrated series presents a handsomely rendered adaptation of the orphaned Pip's first-person narrative of his journey from humble childhood to adulthood as an English gentleman. Though quite involving, this retelling of the Dickens classic registers as a "fast forward" version of the epic tale of one man's evolution and the hard lessons learned from it, but that aspect is a minor quibble shoved aside by Geary's charmingly cartoony art. Long hailed for his unique work in such diverse showcases as the New York Times, National Lampoon and his exceptional continuing series A Treasury of Victorian Murder, Geary's fleshy characterizations breathe a near-animated life into the classic tale. This pleasant graphic interpretation can serve as an introduction to Dickens for younger readers and perhaps eventually steer them to the wider world of the source material and beyond. (Apr.)

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Publishers Weekly

Gr 7 Up

A young man's burning desire to fulfill his "great expectations" of fame and fortune is presented in Charles Dickens's classic tale of love, madness, forgiveness, and redemption. Simon Vance's masterful narration brings to life such diverse personalities as Miss Havisham, the old woman who was abandoned on her wedding day and is determined to wreak revenge through her beautiful adopted daughter Estella; Joe, Pip's lumbering and slow-witted, but emotionally wise and faithful friend; the mysterious Magwitch, a convict who turns out to be Pip's financial benefactor; and Pip, the boy who longs for a destiny greater than that of living out his days as a blacksmith's apprentice. The companion ebook features automatic start-up, keyword searching, PDF printable format, and table of contents. An exceptionally skilled rendering of this classic.-Cindy Lombardo, Cleveland Public Library, OH

School Library Journal

★ 08/01/2014
Expertly narrated by Simon Vance, with a PDF copy of the book included on the first disc. Great Expectations also won an Audie in 2010 for classic and solo narration—male (Audio Connoisseur, narrated by Charlton Griffin), but that edition will likely be more difficult for libraries to acquire.

Library Journal

A frustrated actor, Dickens himself entertained thousands in England and America with readings from his own books. But would his reading of GREAT EXPECTATIONS be better than this one? Not likely. American actor and audio superstar Frank Muller is known for authenticity of voices, outstanding interpretation, and sheer natural ability. His is a voice one could listen to forever--it is sonorous and mellow without any unpleasant raspiness. Perhaps Muller’s reading is a bit fast, but the dramatic intensity and nuance keep one from losing meaning. His characterizations are superb, expecially those of the imperious Jaggers, the sniveling Orlick and the confounding Magwitch. Muller’s great strength lies in his ability to project an ease of presentation that, when combined with his extraordinary emotional alertness, produces a most engaging effect. Surprisingly soft-spoken and confidential in tone, Muller’s Pip seems to be talking directly to the listener. Charles Dickens would have been pleased to know that his words are being recalled to life. P.W. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

AUG 93 - AudioFile