Great Expectations was Dickens’s thirteenth and penultimate novel, written when he was at the height of his powers and deemed to be the voice of Victorian England. It was published in 1861, again after having been serialized in Dickens’s literary periodical All Year Round. Despite Dickens’s own assessment that it might very well be his best work, it did not meet with universal praise. Although Thomas Carlyle dismissed Pip and his book in an off the cuff comment, several critics of the time and later gave it the praise it so obviously deserves. It remains one of Dickens’s most popular novels, and, as it is a bildungsroman, a “coming of age” novel, written in the first person of the protagonist, Pip, it is all but required reading for any student or young adult and more than suitable reading for any lover of good fiction. The Romantic who’s lived long enough to learn the more painful lessons of life is, by nature, a lover of beginnings – great beginnings with their promise and potential. Pip is an orphan who starts from a place of little comfort, but for the ministrations of good Joe, the blacksmith. And yet Pip is also a character, who through no conscious act or intent of his own, soon embarks on a great beginning with equal expectations. He lives fully experiencing the pain and joys of love, found, lost and, perhaps, found again. He travels a high road allowed very few in that time and place, and we are the beneficiaries of those travels having been invited along for the ride.   (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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