Les Grandes Espérances

A novel of childhood and adolescence, a story of education, a psychological and moral adventure of global scope, Great Expectations, Dickens's penultimate completed work, surprises with its freshness, its unceasing renewal of inventiveness, and its comic element.

The hero-narrator, Pip, transitions from childhood in a village, where he is an apprentice blacksmith, to a luxurious and dissolute adolescence in London. Moving moments alternate with comic ones. The story of the rich convict condemned to death is worthy of Victor Hugo.

The presence of dreams or certain fantastical scenes, such as the sudden sight of the swallows at the city entrance, gives the novel its poetic dimension.