Great Expectations

Pip is an orphan being raised by his sister and her husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery, when a chance encounter with an escaped convict on the marshes and a strange summons to entertain the reclusive, jilted Miss Havisham at Satis House set his life on an entirely different course. Miss Havisham has raised her adopted daughter Estella deliberately cold, as an instrument to break men's hearts, and Pip falls for her anyway, and when an anonymous benefactor later provides him money and a gentleman's education in London, Pip assumes, wrongly, that it must be Miss Havisham grooming him for Estella. The truth arrives with the convict Abel Magwitch, now wealthy and returning in secret from transportation, who reveals that he, not Miss Havisham, is the source of Pip's fortune, repaying a boy's single act of kindness on the marshes years before. Pip's snobbery toward Joe, and his shame at the plain, working world he came from, curdle through the middle of the book even as the plot tightens around Magwitch's danger, Estella's cold marriage to the brutal Bentley Drummle, and Miss Havisham's own slow, terrible reckoning with what she made of her adopted daughter. Pip loses the fortune, nearly loses his life helping Magwitch escape England, and returns at the end to Joe's forgiveness and, in the novel's revised ending, an ambiguous reunion with the widowed Estella among the ruins of Satis House.

Dickens wrote two endings. In the original, Pip, still single, meets Estella briefly and unromantically in London years later, after she has been widowed and remarried; the novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton, reading it in proof, urged Dickens to soften an ending he found too sad, and Dickens rewrote the final pages to close instead with the line "I saw no shadow of another parting from her." Both versions survive, and readers still argue about which one the novel actually earns.

The book is narrated entirely by Pip looking back on his own younger self, and its portrait of a decent boy's slow, humiliating education out of his own snobbery remains sharper and less sentimental than its familiarity in adaptation sometimes suggests.