Charles Dickens is an unsurpassed master who gave the world unforgettable novels of the “golden age of English literature”: “Great Expectations,” “David Copperfield,” “The Adventures of Oliver Twist,” “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,” and many others.
The novel has endured an incredible number of film adaptations and stage productions and became the basis for a cult, modernized version starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro in the leading roles. The story of Pip, a boy from a simple peasant family who unexpectedly gets the chance to “make something of himself” and enter the best London society, and of Estella, whom her guardian—a half-mad aristocrat—made into a weapon of her revenge, raising her into a fatal beauty who breaks men’s hearts, fascinates the reader from the very first pages. Yet the surrounding vivid and colorful pictures of Victorian London do not yield to it either in wit or charm.