Great-Expectations-(Illustrated)

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel, which depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story).

It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person.

The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861.

In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes.

The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch.

Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery - poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death - and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture.

These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe.