Grandes esperanzas

In the opening chapters of this famous novel, Pip, a fearful orphan boy, has a terrifying encounter with an escaped prisoner who is forced to procure food and a file. Shortly after, he is called to the gloomy mansion of a rich and reclusive lady as a playmate of a dry, beautiful, and haughty girl; there the orphan learns, for the first time, that his hands are rough and his boots too thick. Shortly thereafter, he comes into possession of a mysterious fortune that is placed in his hands by a secret benefactor who wishes to make a knight of him. Great Expectations (1860-61), Dickens's penultimate novel and undoubtedly one of his masterpieces, is not only a story of great dreams and dramatic setbacks, but essentially, as Chesterton put it, of great hesitations, those of the young hero "among the humble life, to which he owes everything, and the luxurious life, from which something awaits him. " Shame and guilt, love and vanity, crime and prison are the leit-motivs of the chronicle of an identity that is lost and that is won through a surprising event that is like an anecdote of destiny, ironic and serious at the same time.