Cultural historian Dr. David Parker and Thelma Grove of the International Dickens Fellowship analyze the characters and plot of Dickens' popular and enduring novel. Using dramatized key scenes from the work, Parker and Grove discuss the behavior of the characters and speculate on Dickens' intentions when he placed them in the various predicaments depicted. Several of these situations are associated with actual people and events in Dickens' hometown...

Violence and Victorian gentility meet in one of Dickens' greatest creations, Great Expectations. Pip's epic journey from boy to man has at its center his relationships with the terrifying convict Magwitch, manipulative Miss Havisham and the beautiful but heartless Estella. Tony Marchant's new adaptation is dark, sometimes savagely comic and wholly unsentimental. A BBC Production.

Pip starts his new life as a gentleman in London, quickly acquiring expensive tastes, and mounting debts. He falls deeper in love with Estella and escorts her around town. As his twenty first birthday approaches, Pip waits for his benefactor and their intentions to be revealed.

After Pip, an orphaned blacksmith's apprentice inherits a fortune from an anonymous benefactor, his future seems promising. But a bitter heiress is intent on preventing Pip from finding true love.

This adaptation of one of Charles Dickens's finest novels was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Many critics call it one of the greatest of all filmed versions of Dickens. It tells the story of the orphaned boy Pip, who is brought up as a gentlemen with the help of a mysterious benefactor and who falls in love with the beautiful Estella.

-- Great ExpectationsGreat Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens’s abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero.”

The characters of Great Expectations are just as vivid now as when they were created in the 1800s. As Pip journeys from childhood to adulthood, his encounters with an eclectic cast of characters help define his growth and development to maturity. This program looks at three of the key characters in Pip’s progress: Joe Gargery, Estella, and Magwitch.

This program offers insights into the stylistic devices employed by Dickens to great effect in the novel Great Expectations. Learn more about the characteristics and writing style that have contributed to the perennial popularity of this work, including the author’s use of specific literary techniques and his highly memorable characters—some quite familiar and some very strange.

A vivid adaptation of Charles Dickens' powerful story of a young orphan boy who is released from his apprenticeship by a mysterious benefactor to be educated in London.