Great Expectations
Pip's great expectations are also England's, and their dissolution is the 19th century's most honest self-portrait. Miss Havisham and Magwitch are Dickens at his most mythically charged. Published in 1861, it concentrates his gifts more purely than any other novel. BBC Big Read ranked it seventeenth.
Pip comes into money and becomes ashamed of the blacksmith who raised him, which readers find harder to forgive than Dickens seems to. Before that comes the childhood section on the marsh, where people stall for months. The plot then leans on coincidence hard enough that everyone turns out related to everyone: "kept having to remind myself what the plot was." Paid by the installment, Dickens padded, and readers notice: "too many words, too many pages," a "book is a hundred pages too long," then a finish where the "plot suddenly sped up from leisurely pace to Indy 500 race." One verdict files it as "Oliver Twist 2.0 with a first person narrator."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
