Just Finished Reading Great Expectations

I just finished reading Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations.  At the risk of being visited in my dreams by the ghosts of high school English teachers past, present, and future, I'm going to attempt a semblance of a review...

In Great Expectations, which is set in mid-nineteenth century London, Dickens examines the then-very strongly delineated class distinctions in England of that era.  Pip, an orphan boy, is taken in by his strong-willed sister and her amiable, easy-going husband...who becomes a strong friend to Pip.  He grows up in a working class neighborhood and has a scary run-in with an escaped convict.  Later, after becoming bonded as an apprentice in his brother-in-law's smith craft, Pip is notified by a crafty lawyer and his equally crafty clerk that he is the recipient of an endowment from an anonymous source, with the intention of making him a gentleman in the upper class, with "great expectations".  The story then winds on, examining Pip's ordeals and pretensions as he tries to reconcile his former and present lives with the people he had come to know on both sides of the social divide.  Along with this is a recurring subplot focusing on an eccentric reclusive elderly woman and her adopted daughter, with whom Pip falls in love.

Great Expectations has a great range of emotional expression, with a generally sad feel to it that has a great amount of humor nonetheless.  I think I enjoyed the characterizations more than anything, especially those of the aforementioned lawyer and clerk.  I couldn't help thinking that, as a child, Pip displayed more common sense and reason than when he had moved away to become a gentleman.  The adults in this novel at times reacted in a very irrational, childish manner, creating a scenario that reminded me of the cartoon satire series South Park and how they generally portray adults.  As a matter of fact, after reading Great Expectations, I wonder whether the creators of that series might have been thinking of it...after all, they even at one time had a character named Pip who was patterned after this story.

I think that, regarding Great Expectations, the population is divided three ways about it:  the overwhelming number who never read it, the number who only read it because they were assigned it by an English teacher, and like me, the number who read it on their own.  I belong to that last category, which in all probability is also the smallest.  I'm glad I read it, though, and regret that high school, at least for me, tended to make what could have been fun reading into something of an ordeal...