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Great Expectations

Charles Dickens · novel, 1861·14 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version14 hrs → 50 sec
  • A convict in a churchyard threatens Pip with a phantom accomplice. Escaped prisoner Magwitch turns Pip upside down and warns him that a hidden "young man" has "a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver" if Pip does not steal a file and food by morning.
  • Miss Havisham's clocks have all stopped at twenty minutes to nine. Pip finds her in a rotted wedding dress with one shoe still on the table beside her. At their first card game Estella looks at him with disdain and says, "And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!"
  • A lawyer shows up at the forge and changes Pip's life in one sentence. Jaggers tells Joe he has come to relieve him of his apprentice, then turns to Pip: "the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations." Pip immediately assumes Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and never checks.
  • The real benefactor climbs Pip's stairs on a stormy November night. It is Magwitch, not Miss Havisham. "Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has done it!" he says, then calls himself Pip's "second father," undoing every assumption Pip had built his identity on.
  • Pip beats out a fire with his bare hands to save the woman who ruined him. Back at Satis House, Miss Havisham's dress catches from the hearth and she runs at him "shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her." Pip smothers the flames with his coat and burns both hands doing it.
  • The novel ends in the same ruined garden where the story began. Eleven years on, Pip meets a widowed, "bent and broken" Estella among the rubble of Satis House. The last line: "I saw no shadow of another parting from her."
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is a landmark case of an author changing his own verdict on love under public pressure, Dickens rewrote his bleaker original ending into the hopeful one printed here, and that revised final line is now the only ending most readers ever see.

An orphan blacksmith's boy is handed a fortune by a mysterious benefactor and spends it trying to become a gentleman worthy of a woman who was raised to break his heart.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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