Great Expectations

出版者:Wordsworth Editions Ltd

作者:Charles Dickens

页数:410

出版时间:1992-5-1

价格:GBP 1.99

装帧:Paperback

isbn号码:9781853260049

丛书系列:Wordsworth Classics

具体描述

狄更斯（1812～1870）英国小说家，一生共创作了14部长篇小说，许多中、短篇小说和杂文、游记、戏剧、小品。

《远大前程》（又名《孤星血泪》）是狄更斯最成熟的作品之一，是他比较晚期的作品。狄更斯经历了丰富的人间生活后，对人，对周围环境，对自己的生活经历都有了深刻的认识，而所有他成熟的思想认识都汇总在《远大前程》一书中。

Book Description

An unknown benefactor provides Philip Pirrip with the chance to escape his poor upbringing. Aspiring to be a gentleman, and encouraged by his expectations of wealth, he abandons his friends and moves to London. His expectations prove to be unfounded however, and he must return home penniless.

Amazon.com

Dickens considered Great Expectations one of his "little pieces," and indeed, it is slim compared to such weighty novels as David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby. But what this cautionary tale of a young man raised high above his station by a mysterious benefactor lacks in length, it more than makes up for in its remarkable characters and compelling story. The novel begins with young orphaned Philip Pirrip--Pip--running afoul of an escaped convict in a cemetery. This terrifying personage bullies Pip into stealing food and a file for him, threatening that if he tells a soul "your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate." The boy does as he's asked, but the convict is captured anyway, and transported to the penal colonies in Australia. Having started his novel in a cemetery, Dickens then ups the stakes and introduces his hero into the decaying household of Miss Havisham, a wealthy, half-mad woman who was jilted on her wedding day many years before and has never recovered. Pip is brought there to play with Miss Havisham's ward, Estella, a little girl who delights in tormenting Pip about his rough hands and future as a blacksmith's apprentice.

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.

It is an infection that Pip never quite recovers from; as he spends more time with Miss Havisham and the tantalizing Estella, he becomes more and more discontented with his guardian, the kindhearted blacksmith, Joe, and his childhood friend Biddy. When, after several years, Pip becomes the heir of an unknown benefactor, he leaps at the chance to leave his home and friends behind to go to London and become a gentleman. But having expectations, as Pip soon learns, is a two-edged sword, and nothing is as he thought it would be. Like that other "little piece," A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations is different from the usual Dickensian fare: the story is dark, almost surreal at times, and you'll find few of the author's patented comic characters and no comic set pieces. And yet this is arguably the most compelling of Dickens's novels for, unlike David Copperfield or Martin Chuzzlewit, the reader can never be sure that things will work out for Pip. Even Dickens apparently had his doubts--he wrote two endings for this novel. 　--Alix Wilber

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Novel by Charles Dickens, first published serially in All the Year Round in 1860-61 and issued in book form in 1861. The novel was one of its author's greatest critical and popular successes. The first-person narrative relates the coming-of-age of Pip (Philip Pirrip). Reared in the marshes of Kent by his disagreeable sister and her sweet-natured husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery, the young Pip one day helps a convict to escape. Later he is sent to live with Miss Havisham, a woman driven half-mad years earlier by her lover's departure on their wedding day. Her other ward is the orphaned Estella, whom she is teaching to torment men with her beauty. Pip, at first cautious, later falls in love with Estella, to his misfortune. When an anonymous benefactor makes it possible for Pip to go to London for an education, he credits Miss Havisham. He begins to look down on his humble roots, but nonetheless Estella spurns him again and marries instead the ill-tempered Bentley Drummle. Pip's benefactor turns out to have been Abel Magwitch, the convict he once aided, who dies awaiting trial after Pip is unable to help him a second time. Joe rescues Pip from despair and nurses him back to health.

From AudioFile

Great literature can pose problems for narrators. If the book is a classic, the pitfalls are that the listener has a preconceived notion of how the book should sound and, perhaps, how the characters themselves should sound. It is, thus, heartening to listen to Michael Page's narration of Dickens's tale. He sheds new light on the text and shows off his collection of personalities and voices. Page twists his English accent so that the characters have their own unique inflections, laughs and resonance. His voice is slightly nasal but full. He's exceptionally good at setting the tone of this rather wistful novel. And his marvelous diction and pacing make the story vibrant and interesting. R.I.G.

About Author

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England,where his father was a naval pay clerk. When he was five the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, another port town. He received some education at a small private school but this was curtailed when his father's fortunes declined. More significant was his childhood reading, which he evoked in a memory of his father's library: 'From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time.'

When Dickens was ten the family moved to Camden Town, and this proved the beginning of a long, difficult period. (He wrote later of his coach journey, alone, to join his family at the new lodgings: 'I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.') When he had just turned twelve Dickens was sent to work for a manufacturer of boot blacking, where for the better part of a year he labored for ten hours a day, an unhappy experience that instilled him with a sense of having been abandoned by his family: 'No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!' Around the same time Dickens's father was jailed for debt in the Marshalsea Prison, where he remained for fourteen weeks. After some additional schooling, Dickens worked as a clerk in a law office and taught himself shorthand; this qualified him to begin working in 1831 as a reporter in the House of Commons, where he was known for the speed with which he took down speeches.

By 1833 Dickens was publishing humorous sketches of London life in the Monthly Magazine, which were collected in book form as Sketches by 'Boz' (1836). These were followed by the publication in installments of the comic adventures that became The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), whose unprecedented popularity made the twenty-five-year-old author a national figure. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who would bear him ten children over a period of fifteen years. Dickens's energies enabled him to lead an active family and social life, including an indulgence in elaborate amateur theatricals, while maintaining a literary productiveness of astonishing proportions. He characteristically wrote his novels for serial publication, and was himself the editor of many of the periodicals—Bentley's Miscellany, The Daily News, Household Words, All the Year Round—in which they appeared. Among his close associates were his future biographer John Forster and the younger Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on fictional and dramatic works. In rapid succession he published Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and Barnaby Rudge (1841), sometimes working on several novels simultaneously.

Dickens's celebrity led to a tour of the United States in 1842. There he met Longfellow, Irving, Bryant, and other literary figures, and was received with an enthusiasm that was dimmed somewhat by the criticisms Dickens expressed in his American Notes (1842) and in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). The appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 sealed his position as the most widely popular writer of his time; it became an annual tradition for him to write a story for the season, of which the most memorable were The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845). He continued to produce novels at only a slightly diminished rate, publishing Dombey and Son in 1848 and David Copperfield in 1850; of the latter, his personal favorite among his books, he wrote to Forster: 'If I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.'

From this point on his novels tended to be more elaborately constructed and harsher and less buoyant in tone than his earlier works. These late novels include Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865, was his last completed novel, and perhaps the most somber and savage of them all. Dickens had separated from his wife in 1858—he had become involved a year earlier with a young actress named Ellen Ternan—and the ensuing scandal had alienated him from many of his former associates and admirers. He was weakened by years of overwork and by a near-fatal railroad disaster during the writing of Our Mutual Friend. Nevertheless he embarked on a series of public readings, including a return visit to America in 1867, which further eroded his health. A final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a crime novel much influenced by Wilkie Collins, was left unfinished upon his death on June 9,1870, at the age of 58.

Book Dimension :

length: (cm)19.8 width:(cm)12.6

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远大前程

读后感

Last night I finished the 1st part of Pip's Great Expections. Lot of scenes remind me of days in recesses, like my one-day apprenticeship in a forge and my turning down of escort from my father on my first trip to college. The story is mediocre, but languag...  

小虾米不知道，如何二手交换书，请问如何交换？如果自己没有这本书，在豆瓣网是不是读不到啊？ so many questions, excuse me

Last night I finished the 1st part of Pip's Great Expections. Lot of scenes remind me of days in recesses, like my one-day apprenticeship in a forge and my turning down of escort from my father on my first trip to college. The story is mediocre, but languag...  

Last night I finished the 1st part of Pip's Great Expections. Lot of scenes remind me of days in recesses, like my one-day apprenticeship in a forge and my turning down of escort from my father on my first trip to college. The story is mediocre, but languag...  

开头和结尾最棒。一共有两种结尾。一种使人联想到杜拉斯《情人》的开头，同时给人想象的空间。相比之下更偏爱悲情的那一个结尾：I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview, for in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that ...  

用户评价

如果要用一个词来概括这本书的阅读体验，那便是“沉浸”。它构建了一个如此完整、如此自洽的虚拟世界，以至于你仿佛真的能闻到伦敦街头的煤烟味，听到农场里家禽的叫声，感受到社交场合中那些虚伪的寒暄。我特别欣赏作者如何巧妙地利用各种象征物来烘托主题。例如，那些总是弥漫着水汽的、泥泞的沼泽地，不仅仅是地理上的存在，更是主角早期心灵状态的视觉投射。而那些高耸入云、却又冰冷疏离的宅邸，则象征着他所追逐的、却又遥不可及的社会理想。更精彩的是，书中对“身份”的探讨，是如此的具有前瞻性。主角的身份转变，并非仅仅是外部标签的更换，而是一种痛苦的内在重塑过程。他不得不学习如何扮演一个“他者”，学习那些上流社会的潜规则，而这个过程，几乎是以牺牲他真实自我为代价的。这本书无疑是文学史上的一座丰碑，它不仅仅是一个故事，它是一种文化现象，值得反复品味，每一次都会带来新的感悟和深思。

这本书简直是一部关于人性挣扎与社会阶层流动的史诗，我完全被皮普那从一个卑微的铁匠学徒到一个受人尊敬的绅士的蜕变过程所深深吸引。狄更斯（我猜是这位作者吧，因为那种维多利亚时代特有的细腻笔触和对底层人民的深切同情实在是太明显了）没有将这个过程描绘成一条笔直向上的康庄大道，反而充满了道德上的困境和情感上的迷惘。你想想看，当一个人突然拥有了财富和地位，他首先会做什么？这本书告诉我们，他很可能会忘记那些真正关心他的人，转而去追逐那些虚妄的光影。我尤其喜欢书中对那些“好心人”的刻画，他们并非完美无瑕，甚至带着这样那样的缺点和局限性，但正是他们的真实和无私，构成了整个故事中最温暖的底色。那位名叫乔的铁匠，他的善良和忠诚，与皮普后来的那种急功近利的浮躁形成了鲜明的对比。每一次读到皮普辜负乔的场景，我的心都会为之一紧，仿佛能感受到那种被背叛的痛苦。而且，小说的叙事节奏控制得极好，高潮迭起，让你完全沉浸其中，仿佛自己就是那个在雾气弥漫的沼泽地里徘徊，同时又在伦敦的华丽宅邸中感到格格不入的年轻人。这不仅仅是一个成长故事，更是一面映照我们自身虚荣与追求的镜子。

读完之后，我感到一种难以言喻的复杂情绪，与其说这是一本“小说”，不如说是一份对十九世纪英国社会生态的精妙解剖报告。作者对于环境的描写简直达到了令人发指的精确度，无论是阴森凄冷的沼泽地，还是充斥着浮华与算计的上流社交圈，每一个场景都仿佛被施了魔法，立体地呈现在眼前。那些人物的口音、穿着打扮、乃至细微的肢体语言，都被捕捉得丝丝入扣，让人不禁要停下来，想象着自己在那个时代，会是哪个角落里不起眼的小人物。特别是对那些法律和金钱的描绘，充满了讽刺的意味，揭示了财富是如何轻易地腐蚀人心，将原本纯真的情感扭曲变形。更令人称道的是，作者并没有将角色简单地划分为“好人”和“坏人”。那些看似冷酷无情的人，往往隐藏着不为人知的苦衷和悲剧；而那些看似光鲜亮丽的角色，内心深处却可能藏着最深的黑暗。这种多维度的刻画，让整个故事显得如此真实可信，充满了人性的灰度，而非简单的黑白对立。每一次重读，我都能发现一些之前忽略掉的伏笔和象征意义，这才是经典文学作品的魅力所在，它会随着读者的阅历一同成长。

我必须承认，这本书在情感冲击力上达到了一个极高的水准。它不只是在“讲述”一个故事，它是在“体验”一种人生。那些关于爱与背叛、忠诚与遗忘的篇章，其感染力之强，远超我读过的许多当代小说。比如那位充满谜团的、孤僻的女士，她的悲剧性过往被层层剥开时，那种跨越时空的怜悯与震撼，足以让任何一个心存柔软的读者为之动容。它探讨了“什么才是真正的财富？”这个永恒的命题。金钱可以买来华服、仆人和名望，但它显然买不来内心的平静和真挚的友谊。这种对精神价值的强调，在那个物质至上的时代背景下，显得尤为珍贵和前卫。作者的语言华美而不失力量，充满了生动的比喻和深刻的洞察力，即便是描述最普通的日常生活场景，也能从中提炼出一种诗意的美感。读完后，我发现自己对身边的人和事都多了一层审视，开始反思自己是否也曾在不经意间，轻视了那些默默付出、不求回报的善良。

这本书的结构精巧得像一座复杂的钟表，每一个齿轮——无论是突如其来的遗产、神秘的幕后资助人，还是那些时不时冒出来的古怪角色——都紧密咬合，驱动着情节向着一个不可避免的、却又令人震撼的结局前进。我尤其欣赏作者在悬念设置上的高超技巧。从一开始，那种若有若无的危险感就如同一条冰冷的丝线缠绕着主角。你总是隐隐觉得有什么重大的秘密即将揭晓，但它却总是躲在迷雾之后，让你既好奇又焦虑。这种叙事上的张力，让我在阅读过程中几乎无法放下书卷。它成功地营造了一种“命运的不可抗拒性”。主角的每一次选择，似乎都在被某种看不见的力量推着走，他以为自己在掌控人生，到头来才发现自己不过是棋盘上的一个棋子。这种宿命论的色彩，在狄更斯笔下，没有变得沉闷或消极，反而因为对“希望”与“幻灭”的深刻探讨，显得尤其富有力量。最终的真相揭露，不仅解开了故事的谜团，更带来了一场深刻的自我救赎，读来酣畅淋漓，大呼过瘾。

我还在努力使自己爱上狄更斯和奥斯丁。。。

语言真的很有英国的味道. 刚开始看很费劲,最后才能习惯哪些长长的倒装和古典的词语.

第2本原著@看《远大前程》过程中竟然发现我以前好像读过这个故事（那时叫孤星血泪），开头的那片阴郁的沼泽地、墓碑、镣铐、犯人和书末惊险刺激的逃亡之旅给我的印象太深刻了，又将我拉回了八九年前，就跟Pip想起年幼时的沼泽地一样，让我读完产生一种和主人公相似的恍如隔世的感觉。Pip和Estella之间的暧昧之情，让我难以释怀，Pip的远大前程更让人叹息，倒是Herbert和Wemmick的生活让人向往，这据说也是狄更斯小说的特色，总是会展现一些光明美好的一面给读者。伟大的小说，伟大的狄更斯。

语言真的很有英国的味道. 刚开始看很费劲,最后才能习惯哪些长长的倒装和古典的词语.

Audio book read by Michael Page. Great story, excellent reading performance by Page. I did not expect so much enjoyment nor such speedy re