How Great Expectations Should Be a Bit Smaller

Great Expectations is Dickens's 13th novel, written in first person narrative. Phillip Pirrip-Pip is the narrator of his own story, in which he exhibits the growth of personality.

His story begins with a mournful impression – the foggy marshes spreading drearily by the seaward Thames – and throughout the novel this effect of cold and damp and dreariness remains.

During his childhood, which he now remembers with remorse, Pip goes to play at Satis House, which belonged to an eccentric rich old woman Miss Havisham. She is the adopted mother of Estella, whom Pip falls in love with. Miss Havisham had taught Estella to break men's heart as restitution for hers having been left at the alter years before.

When pip begins to receive money through an unknown source, convinced that money comes from Miss Havisham, he goes to London to become a gentleman. Later on he realizes that his benefactor was actually Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict whom he had secretly helped once as a kid. This convict helps Pip realize that money and fortune in London had done nothing for Pip but let him drift away from his old friends. He goes home, wanting to marry his old friend Biddy but none of his plans come true.

Great Expectations is the perfect expression of a phase of English society: it is a statement of what money can do, good and bad; of how it can make distinctions of class; how it can pervert virtue, sweeten manners, open up new fields of enjoyment and suspicion.

The mood of the book belongs not to the imaginary date of its plot but to the time in which it was written; for the unquestioned assumptions that Pip can be transformed by money and the minor graces it can buy, and that the loss of one fortune can be repaired on the strength of incidental gains in voice and friends, were only possible in a country secure in its internal economy, with expanding markets abroad.

Pip's expectations lose their greatness, and Pip is saved from the grosser dangers of wealth; but by the end he has gained a wider and deeper knowledge of life.

A very inspirational story throughout the book.