Great Expectations

Pip, an orphan raised by his harsh sister and her kind husband Joe, the village blacksmith, meets an escaped convict on the Kentish marshes and helps him. Soon after, he is sent to play at Satis House, where the rich Miss Havisham, jilted on her wedding day, still wears her yellowed wedding dress among stopped clocks and a rotting cake, and is raising the beautiful Estella to break men's hearts. When a secret benefactor gives Pip 'great expectations' of a fortune, he goes to London to become a gentleman, grows ashamed of Joe, and learns, painfully, where his money comes from and what a gentleman really is.

Charles Dickens published the novel in weekly parts in 1860 and 1861, and changed his first, sadder ending at the suggestion of his friend Bulwer-Lytton. Told by Pip looking back on his own vanity, it is one of his most tightly constructed books. His earlier story of a boy's growing up is David Copperfield.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.