Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (The Connell Guide To ...) - Softcover

Sutherland, John; Connell, Jolyon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907776036 ISBN 13: 9781907776038

Publisher: Connell Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

Great Expectations is one of the best-selling Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been adapted more for both film and television. It has been as popular with critics as it has with the public. In 1937, George Bernard Shaw called the novel Dickens’s “most compactly perfect book”. John Lucas describes it as “the most perfect and the most beautiful of all Dickens’s novels”, Angus Wilson as “the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced”.                                                                                 
Great Expectations has been so successful partly because it’s an exciting story. Dickens always had a keen eye on the market and subscribed to Wilkie Collins’s advice: “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, above all make ‘em wait.” From the violent opening scene on the marshes to the climax of Magwitch’s attempted escape on the Thames, the story is full of suspense, mystery and drama. But while these elements of Great Expectations have ensured its popularity, it is also a novel which, as this guide will seek to show, raises profound questions not just about the nature of Victorian society but about the way human relationships work and the extent to which people are shaped by their childhoods and the circumstances in which they grow up.

About this title

About the Author

John Sutherland, described by Claire Tomalin as "the sharpest and wittiest of literary commentators", is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus, UCL, and has for many years been a visiting professor at the Californian Institute of Technology. He is the author of many books and more editions than he cares to count. He writes and reviews widely in the UK and the US. His most recent books are: The Boy who Loved Books (2007), Magic Moments (2008), Curiosities of Literature (2008), The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, 2nd Edition (2009), 50 Ideas in Literature You Really Need to Know (2010, with Stephen Fender). He's currently working on Lives of the Novelists.     

Jolyon Connell is the founder and editorial director of The Week and Money Week. A former Washington Correspondent of The Sunday Times, and deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph, he has a first-class degree in English from the University of St Andrews and an honorary doctorate from the same university.

Review

'I only wish an accessible and insightful guide like this had been available to me as a teenager, encountering Dickens for the first time and missing so much which Sutherland and Connell brilliantly identify and explain.' Sir Max Hastings

About this edition

• Publisher: Connell Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1907776036
• ISBN 13: 9781907776038
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128