Small Paperback, Fair Condition, Previous Owners Marking, 1971, 512 pages, ISBN 0 14 043 003 2

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

Great Expectations (first published in 1860) is one of the most mature and serious of Dickens’s novels. As Angus Calder points out in his introduction, it resembles a detective story – but in the sense in which Oedipus Rex also resembles one. From the first shock of the early pages, when Pip encounters the convict Magwitch, the mystery grips our attention and its psychological and moral truth hols us until the end. For in discovering the secret of his ‘great expectations’, Pip also begins to discover the truth about himself.