Writing for Behemoth

Great Expectation is one of the three books that influenced me as a teenager. I found this wonderful book in our library and quickly was absorbed in it. I remember that I asked my Mom to give it to a binding expert to change and re-new its cover.

As much as it can look funny, but I enjoyed sitting in our downstairs room, listen to our old Pet Shop Boys cassette and re-read it again and again.

In George Orwell’s fantastic article about Dickens, I just cared about the notes about this book.

I like the characters of the book more than anything… people like:

Joe Gargery, Mr Jaggers and John Wemmick and Miss Havisham (the latter is the nickname for one of our relatives) and then, of course, the great first chapter of the book which explains the world with the eye of Pip, a small boy, is simply marvellous.

This paragraph belongs to the first chapter:

“The shape of the letters on my father's gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘ALSO GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE’, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine... I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.”

George Orwell wrote about this paragraph as follows:

“… how accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child's mind, its visualising tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of impression. Pip relates how in his childhood his ideas about his dead parents were derived from their tombstones...”

#BookReview #CharlesDickens #GeorgeOrwell #GreatExpectations