Read Great Expectations by email.
You have started this book before. This time you will finish it.
A blacksmith's boy meets an escaped convict in a marsh churchyard, and years later a lawyer arrives with impossible news: Pip has great expectations, from a benefactor he must never try to name. Dickens's most perfectly plotted novel — and his funniest and saddest — about what money does to a good heart.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Eleven months from now, you will have read Dickens.
349 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1861
- Installments
- 349
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 184,523
- Reading time
- 12 hours 49 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 5 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 2.5 months
- At 20 minutes a day
- 5 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Great Expectations?
Great Expectations is the Dickens novel to start with. It is his most disciplined book — one narrator, one central mystery, no padding — and its opening chapter, a terrified child upside down over a grave while a convict demands a file and 'wittles,' may be the best in Victorian fiction. Everything that follows grows out of that marsh: the mad Miss Havisham in her stopped-clock mansion, the beautiful and heartless Estella, and the fortune that arrives with one condition attached.
It is also the great English novel about class shame. Pip gets exactly what he wishes for — escape from the forge, a gentleman's life in London — and Dickens shows, scene by scene, what the wish costs: chiefly Joe, the gentle blacksmith whose love Pip learns to be embarrassed by. The book's engine is a question the reader is invited to answer wrongly, and the answer, when it comes, is one of the most famous reversals in literature.
We serialize the complete novel in Dickens's original text, broken at his own chapter seams, with a “Previously” recap on every installment — written under a strict rule that keeps the central secret exactly as long as Dickens kept it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Great Expectations?
About thirteen hours straight through (184,523 words). By email, it's 349 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — just under a year, or a few months at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Is this a good first Dickens?
The best one. It's his tightest plot, his only sustained first-person narrator, and it has none of the sprawl that scares people off the doorstop novels. If you read one Dickens in your life, most critics would tell you to make it this.
What is it about, without spoilers?
An orphan raised in a village forge is granted a fortune by an anonymous benefactor and sets out to become a gentleman — and to win the girl he was once hired to play cards with. Who the money is really from, and what it was really for, is the novel's engine, and we don't spoil it.
Do the recaps give away the benefactor?
No. Every recap covers only the previous installment, and Pip's guesses are always reported as his guesses. You learn the truth in the exact installment where Pip does — around day 232, if you keep the daily pace.
Which edition is this?
Dickens's original English text in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, drawn from the public-domain text, including the revised ending Dickens published (the one with the famous last line about shadows).
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.