Ten years before his death, Dickens wrote Great Expectations, his second fictional autobiography. Its hero, Philip Pirrip (Pip), looks back on his aspirations to rise in the world, his thwarted expectations, his love for an unattainable woman, and his relationship to crime. Far from endorsing Victorian values of social striving, the novel explores their questionable effects on the life of a working-class boy who strives to become a “gentleman.” Not the only character in the novel with “great expectations,” Pip encounters Magwitch, a convict, and Miss Havisham, the jilted bride frozen in time, who burden their progeny with the legacies of their own ambitions and demons.

NOTE: Please read chapters 1–15 for our first class. If you do not already own the novel, I recommend the Penguin Classics edition (1996).