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From the young Pip's first terrifying encounter with the convict Magwitch in the gloom of a graveyard, to the splendidly morbid set pieces in Miss Havisham's mansion, to the magnificently realized boat chase down the Thames, Great Expectations is filled with the transcendent excitement that Dickens could so abundantly provide. But it is also, perhaps because it was written in 1860, at the height of his maturity, distinguished by a bittersweet understanding on the part of its author of the extent to which our deepest moral dilemnas are born of our own obsessionns and illusions.
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