Great Expectations
Charles Dickens · 1861
Pip's great expectations are also England's, and their dissolution is the 19th century's most honest self-portrait. Miss Havisham and Magwitch are Dickens at his most mythically charged. Published in 1861, it concentrates his gifts more purely than any other novel. BBC Big Read ranked it seventeenth.
The case against
Dickens swapped his original ending for a happier one because Bulwer-Lytton told him to, and you can feel the splice. Estella never becomes more than the cruelty she was trained to perform, the coincidences pile past forgiving, and the middle third, Pip moping in London, runs on serial-fiction padding.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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