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** spoiler alert ** well GE is very sentimental, and full of implausible thudding coincidences and all tied up too nicely at the end. but even so, for me it is a great book. the terror and vulnerable sense of childhood is there from the first vivid chapter. and for all the fluff and humour there is darkness - pip's visions of miss havisham hanging for example, even before actual combustion.

GE is a considered view of the melancholy of social mobility, of our hunger for association and of the inequalities of a fast-urbanising land. trabb's boy (who leans to satire) and orlick (who prefers violence) - both on the wrong side of that economic dynamism - might be the central figures if this story was told now by a more radical author.

beyond those last two limited fellows, so many of the other characters are definitely keepers - queenly, tortured miss h; jaggers (who i will always pine for in any legal emergency); the ocean deep gratitude of magwitch; wemmick's aged parent (we'll most of us be there by and by, well i intend to at least); and indeed w himself with his sharp takes on capitalism (the importance of 'portable property') and on the tension between work and home. bland as pip may be, his suffering works to win our sympathy from the start - can't help but think this is a key dickens skill.

so while i can see that dickens condescends to his readers plenty more than does eliot or tolstoy, i am condascendable enough that this book and myself will be 'ever the best of friends', and i am grateful for the 'larks' it offers.