Great Expectations, Paperback

Descriere

In the marshy mists of a village churchyard, a tiny orphan boy named Pip is suddenly terrified by a shivering, limping convict on the run. Years later, a supremely arrogant young Pip boards the coach to London where, by the grace of a mysterious benefactor, he will join the ranks of the idle rich and ``become a gentleman.`` Finally, in the luminous mists of the village at evening, Pip the man meets Estella, his dazzingly beautiful tormentor, in a ruined garden--and lays to rest all the heartaches and illusions that his ``great expectations`` have brought upon him. Dickens's biographer, Edgar H. Johnson, has said that--except for the author's last-minute tampering with his original ending--Great Expectations is ``the most perfectly constructed and perfectly written of all Dickens's works.`` In John Irving's Introduction to this edition, the novelist takes the view that Dickens's revised ending is ``far more that mirror of the quality of trust in the novel as a whole.`` Both versions of the ending are printed here.