Canter Bridge

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It is impossible to exaggerate the satisfaction this book gives to its reader and the power of its deep human sympathy. If you were to read only ten books in your lifetime, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations should be one of them.

If you were to listen to just one audiobook in your life, Frank Muller’s narration of Great Expectations should be it. One of the most complimentary things that can be said of such a performance is that it leaves you feeling that the work can be read only in that way. Muller accomplishes this, with the curious and endearing twist that Pip’s own narration comes with an American accent, while all others speak in the unforgettable idiom of their place among the English classes and subclasses. Muller on Dickens is a triumph that even Dickens would have applauded.

Now, for the book. The personae will stay with you forever. Pip himself. The deeply generous Joe Gargery. The immortally beautiful Estella, her heart in the end made soft through suffering. Miss Havisham, too terrible to believed but in the end redeemed from her lake of bitterness, if her cry, ‘What have I done?!’ is to be taken innocently. Wemmick and the Aged P, then—belatedly, Miss Skiffens the gloved. Herbert, then Herbert and Clara.

Jaggers, about whom one is left to ponder, ‘Who is this man?’

Dickens and Muller are at their best with scoundrels. Expectations provides them no shortage of villains upon whom to practice. Pumblechook. Bentley Drummle. Old Orlick. Compeyson, about whom the best thing said is that he has drowned.

Dickens’ keen eye for the glory and the pathetic depths of humanity is almost unparalleled in English literature, with apologies to his critics. He knows that there are Gargeries and Biddies and Herberts. He understands this without for a moment denying the hell in human hearts that is comprised by the likes of Pumblechook with his false respectability and Orlick with his violent, drooling hatreds.

He has comprehended that heaven—if he believed there is such a place—is likely populated by people surnamed Havisham, Jaggers, and Magwitch, who perhaps dance the more vigorously for having been much forgiven.

Yet writing about Dickens and his worlds takes time that could be spend on reading Dickens and of his worlds.

For that you’ll need to pick up Great Expectations.