Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Now an original series on FX and Hulu starring Olivia Colman

A newly repackaged edition of Dickens’s classic coming-of-age tale, with an introduction, contextual essays, a map, and suggestions for further exploration by Victorian scholar Tanya Agathocleous.

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor-these form a series of events that change the orphan Pip's life forever, as he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens's haunting novel depicts Pip's education and development through adversity as he discovers the true nature of his great expectations. Published nine years before Dickens's death, it remains one of his most celebrated works.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), one of the most important contributors to the canon of English literature, wrote such classics as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield.

Tanya Agathocleous is an associate professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes on Victorian literature and on colonial and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (2011), a Broadview edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a young-adult biography of George Orwell, and several academic articles on a range of nineteenth-century literary topics. She has also written for Public Books and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is currently the vice president of the North American Victorian Studies Association.