Book Review: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

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I’ve just finished something that’s been sitting heavy on my chest. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I’ll be honest—reading it felt like stepping into Pip’s shoes and stumbling through life with him, from the awkwardness of childhood dreams to the raw ache of adulthood disappointments. The way Dickens paints Pip starting as this poor, kindhearted boy who helps a convict in the marshes already hooked me. I mean, that opening scene stuck with me: the fear, the trembling innocence, the desperate act of compassion. It’s such a small moment, but it sets the tone for Pip’s whole life doing the right thing even when it scares him, even when it complicates his world.

Then Miss Havisham Miss Havisham, God. She is one of those characters that burns herself in your mind. Heartbroken, still in her wedding dress, still yellow with time, this broken woman remains in the ruins of her own heartbreak. The thought of walking into her world was like going into a stench cloaked with lace. And when Pip meets with Estella there--cold, beautiful Estella--that is when my heart twisted. Haven’t we all at one time or another loved a person when they could not love us the way we wanted to be loved? The way Estella made Pip feel small, the way she is cruel on purpose, was hard to read, but what really hurt me was how Pip kept trying. Desperate need to be seen as worthy by being looked at- it is so human, it hurts.

And of course there is the twist with Pip having the great expectations. So long, he thinks, some great benefactor (he has Miss Havisham in mind, of course) must be having him ready to be a gentleman, to be a match to Estella. His pride (you can almost feel it swelling and his head lift higher) is beginning to look down on Joe--the loyal, kind, salt-of-the-earth blacksmith who brought him up like a brother. That bit wrecked me. It is because it is so real: how many times have we lost all track of the people who supported us when we were nothing, searching after some shiny future version of ourselves? The way Pip has turned cold on Joe is painful because it is like him kicking himself in the teeth, and yet I could not despise him. It was simply too humanely painful.

The second big jaw-dropper--that Miss Havisham is not his benefactor but Magwitch, the convict he once aided as a boy--was the hook I did not see coming the first time I read it. That twist totally redefined every thing This is when Pip it all falls apart, he loses his entire sense of self as a man of a certain status, a man he thought he was going to be. In that fall, however, there is one thing that is raw and beautiful: Pip recognizing that love, loyalty and goodness are not always dressed well or speak well. It comes sometimes out of the most unlikely people, the most broken people.

And Pip is not redeemed or made clean or easy, his journey back to Joe, his reckoning of his own hubris, his attempts at peace with what was lost, did not feel clean or easy. Dickens does not tie it up with a perfect bow at the end and this is perhaps why it is still lingering. Since in the real world, apology does not make the pain go away, and love does not fall to the right person always. Yet there is something redemptive about the way Pip is finally able to drop the delusions, to finally recognize the value of those he originally neglected.

By the time I put the book down, I felt like I had been on that dirty, painful trip along with him. I think it stuck with me because it is not only about Pip, Estella, Joe, Miss Havisham, it is also about us. Our pride and our heartbreaks and our grasping at dreams that sometimes break in our hands. And perhaps it is not the fortune and the respectability Pip thought he was inheriting but the experiences, the scars, and the people who loved him despite his own undeserving behavior.