Pip is a young orphan living in mid-Victorian England in a village in the country. He is being raised by his older sister and her husband. His sister is impatient and has a brutal temper. Joe is the village blacksmith. He is a gentle giant, simple minded, but he loves and protects young Pip like a son.

One evening Pip is passing by the local graveyard where he is assaulted by an escaped convict who forces him to steal some food for him, and a file so he can cut his leg irons. This traumatic experience haunts Pip for the rest of his childhood.

One day, as an adolescent, he is surprised by an unexpected and anonymous benefactor who leaves him money and sets him up to get educated in London to become a gentleman. Suddenly he finds himself in possession of means and “great expectations.” He spend many years trying to solve the puzzle of his fortunes when eventually it all comes together in a most unexpected fashion.

Great Expectations is my first Dickens novel. It was the last one he wrote, and it is generally praised as his best. Reading it pulls you right into the life of Victorian England. My copy was an illustrated one and I enjoyed the many ink drawings of some of the key scenes. The environment and the clothing of the characters came to life for me.

The plot is crafted masterfully. Great Expectations could easily be a play. The book is 544 pages long. One might think you’d get lost in all the characters. But people who appear in the early chapters seemingly in peripheral roles tend to come back as pivotal characters later. Every character has a deep role in the overall plot. Great Expectations would make a great textbook in a class in writing fiction – and  it probably is. (You can tell I am not a scholar of English).

I learned a lot about life in Victorian England and London in particular,  a world I only know from a distance, from movies and from books. The gulf between the classes is vast. Workers and peasants have no options and no “expectations.” It does not seem possible to work your way out of poverty and “low” birth. People with money, gentlemen, don’t seem to need to work, they just spend, even get into debt, but there seems to be no general stress. Everyone treats a “gentleman” differently. And the common folk all dream of “coming into means” by some miraculous way, through inheritance or some benefactor. I am sure I am oversimplifying matters here but this is the world of the London of Charles Dickens. ‘

If you haven’t read Dickens, like I, and you want to pick up one of his books, this is a good one.