Great Expectations
Exam board: AQA, Edexcel, OCR
Level & Subject: GCSE English Literature
First teaching: September 2015
Next exam: June 2025
This edition of Great Expectations is perfect for GCSE-level students: it comes complete with the novel, plus an introduction providing context, and a glossary explaining key terms.
‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!’
So begins Charles Dickens’s 1861 bildungsroman, the story of the orphan Pip who is catapulted from the desolate Kent marshes of his childhood to become a young gentleman in London.
Who is Pip’s mysterious benefactor? And what role will the troubling figures of escaped convict Magwitch, decaying bride Miss Havisham and the beautiful but aloof Estella play in his prospects?
Told through the first-person voice of the older Pip, this story of great expectations suggests gains always come at a price. Dickens depicts both the horrors of the early nineteenth-century penal system and the rapid rise and fall of fortunes that Victorian society permitted.
Maria Cairney currently teaches in a sixth form college in Manchester. She is an experienced A Level English Literature and English Language teacher and examiner with a PhD in Victorian literature and a special interest in 19th century serialised fiction by writers such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Before becoming a teacher, Maria was also, for many years, a magazine journalist and editor.