In this masterpiece of gripping drama and piercing satire, Dickens also created two of his finest characters in Pip and Miss Haversham.
The story of orphan Pip and the mysterious fortune which falls into his lap, his snobbish rejection of his old friends and his growth through pain and mishap into true maturity is the basis for a story where violence and guilt jostle with sharp and grotesque comedy. From the moment the child Pip meets Magwitch the convict on the eerie Kent marshes, to the last encounter with Estella, the beautiful, heartless woman who has so fruitlessly haunted Pip's emotions, the reader is sucked into a drama whose moral and psychological intensity never slackens.
