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内容简介

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.

作者简介

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England,where his father was a naval pay clerk. When he was five the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, another port town. He received some education at a small private school but this was curtailed when his father's fortunes declined. More significant was his childhood reading, which he evoked in a memory of his father's library: 'From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time.'

目　　录

Introduction by John Irving
Great Expectations
The Original Ending of Great Expectations
Bibliography

在线试读部分章节

From Radhika Jones's Introduction to GreatExpectations

Whatever expectations Charles Dickens had for his thirteenth novel,he probably did not anticipate that it would someday come toexemplify the Victorian novel itself. But to the countlesscontemporary readers who follow the adventures of young Pip, theconvict he fears, the girl he loves, and the strange old woman hethinks will make his fortune, Great Expectations is in manyways the quintessential nineteenth-century story: part mystery,part bildungsroman, or novel of education, in which our hero,rising above his modest beginnings, moves to London, prospers, andeventually (he hopes) gets the girl. Pip's course, however, doesnot run so smoothly, and it is the variations Dickens plays on thistheme that prompt us to read Great Expectations both withand against the grain of the Victorian novel, for at times it isless an emblem of tradition than a marker of change in both theEnglish society it depicts and the English novel it represents.There are surprises at work in Great Expectations for bothits characters and its readers, who bring to it their ownexpectations of what a novel should be and do.

<div>From Radhika Jones's Introduction to Great
Expectations 
 
Whatever expectations Charles Dickens had for his thirteenth novel,
he probably did not anticipate that it would someday come to
exemplify the Victorian novel itself. But to the countless
contemporary readers who follow the adventures of young Pip, the
convict he fears, the girl he loves, and the strange old woman he
thinks will make his fortune, Great Expectations is in many
ways the quintessential nineteenth-century story: part mystery,
part bildungsroman, or novel of education, in which our hero,
rising above his modest beginnings, moves to London, prospers, and
eventually (he hopes) gets the girl. Pip's course, however, does
not run so smoothly, and it is the variations Dickens plays on this
theme that prompt us to read Great Expectations both with
and against the grain of the Victorian novel, for at times it is
less an emblem of tradition than a marker of change in both the
English society it depicts and the English novel it represents.
There are surprises at work in Great Expectations for both
its characters and its readers, who bring to it their own
expectations of what a novel should be and do. 
 
A caricature of Dickens displayed in bookstores when the first
sections of Great Expectations appeared (in serialized form,
as was common for novels in the Victorian era) shows the author at
his desk, pen in hand, hair standing on end, exuding genius. The
caption reads, "Charles Dickens, from whom we have Great
Expectations." Though the pun is obvious, it is worth recalling
for the simple reason that it sounds oddly forward-looking, like
something one would say of a promising young writer at the
beginning of his career. When Dickens began Great
Expectations, at age forty-eight, he already had a dozen novels
to his name, as well as countless short stories; he was also an
accomplished and experienced editor, a powerful publisher, and a
prolific generator of nonfiction-articles, editorials, sketches,
and so on. Thanks to both his own prodigious skills and the
remarkable rise in literacy rates in nineteenth-century England and
America-a fortuitous combination of talented writer and eager new
readership-Dickens was one of the first bona-fide mass-market
writers in history, a best-selling author and, as novelist Jane
Smiley observes in a recent biography, "maybe the first true
celebrity in the modern sense." If the world had Great
Expectations of Dickens, those expectations could be only that
he would continue to deliver a product of which he himself was the
most significant producer: compelling stories that appeared in
monthly or weekly installments to entertain and inform. And so the
caricature's caption reminds us of Dickens's intimate relationship
to his readership; the novels he produced went from his pen to
their hands with a kind of immediacy that no longer exists in the
world of fiction outside of journalism. With every installment of
his new novel, Dickens would fulfill expectations, even as he
stoked the public's appetite for more. 
 
The writing of Great Expectations coincided roughly with a
new phase in Dickens's life and career. He had recently left his
wife, Catherine, mother of his ten children, and had embarked on a
very private affair with a young actress, Ellen Ternan. He had also
discontinued his immensely popular weekly journal Household
Words, of which he was editor and part-owner, after his
copublishers took issue with his decision to print a personal
statement, intended to refute rumors about his dissolving marriage,
on the front page. Now Dickens was editor of a replacement journal,
All the Year Round, in which his historical novel A Tale
of Two Cities debuted. Shortly after finishing that work, he
began contributing chapters of Great Expectations to boost
the circulation, which was sagging due to a lackluster serial by
Charles Lever that was then running. (As Dickens's friend and
biographer John Forster wryly notes: "A tale, which at the time was
appearing in his serial, had disappointed expectation.") Dickens
called a staff meeting to discuss options, but he had already
decided on a course of action: It was time for him to "strike in."
His faith in his selling power did not go unrewarded; circulation
of the weekly rebounded and remained healthy for the rest of
Dickens's career. But his decision had an impact on the story he
was envisioning before it even reached the page. According to
Forster, Dickens was planning to compose his new novel-for which he
had already conceived the pivotal relationship, between a young boy
and a convict-in monthly serial form, comprising twenty numbers,
which would have made it a much longer work on the scale of such
previous hits as Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit. Publishing it in
his weekly journal would require Dickens to reconfigure his idea
into a shorter book, along the lines of its predecessor, A Tale
of Two Cities. The result is a novel more pruned in its plots,
more limited in its cast of characters than others of Dickens's
great works. It was a "sacrifice," Dickens told Forster, "really
and truly made for myself"-a compromise between Dickens the
publisher and Dickens the writer. Thus was Great
Expectations born: out of disappointed expectation, transformed
from its creator's original expectation. The meanings inscribed in
its title had already begun to multiply. 
 </div>

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