Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst of Oxford University talks about Charles Dickens’ life at the time he started writing his classic Great Expectations, and the reason he started writing the book.
‘you are to understand, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret…’
Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past – the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella – and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart.
A powerful and moving novel, Great Expectations is suffused with Dickens’s memories of the past and its grip on the present, and it raises disturbing questions about the extent to which individuals affect each other’s lives. This edition includes a lively introduction, Dickens’s working notes, the novel’s original ending, and an extract from an early theatrical adaptation. It reprints the definitive Clarendon text.
Listen to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst talking about the books’s origins
February 5th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
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