Great Expectations

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

July 23, 2003

There's not much point in reviewing such a classic piece of literature. People have been reading it for almost 150 years now, so there's not much I can add. Anyway, this is the first time I had the pleasure of reading Dickens, and I enjoyed the story, even if I couldn't always follow the narration and dialogue.

The problem, of course is that because Dickens was so in touch with his Victorian readers and wrote to their level, the book loses some of its ability to be understood by modern readers like myself. Obviously there are problems when the publisher has to include footnotes and endnotes to explain terms and concepts. At any rate, most of the time I could follow along well enough to know what was going on, though the book didn't hold many surprises to me. I'd figured out the 'secret' of his benefactor long ago, so it was almost disappointing when my suspicions were proven correct. It seemed that Dickens started to get rush the story along towards the end instead of letting everything develop naturally, but maybe this had something to do with the book being published in monthly installments originally.

While I wouldn't go as far as John Irving--who said it was the reason he wanted to write books for a living--I'll say that Great Expectations was a good book and worth the effort of wading through its antiquities. I recommend this for serious readers, while casual readers should stick to more contemporary works.