Read a Classic this Summer! 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens
by Michael Hartland
As an English tutor, I love using Great Expectations, and not just because it has one of the greatest opening chapters in an English novel. It’s also a model of how to write narrative effectively.
This is because Dickens knew how to interweave different kinds of writing.
Many students just don’t know where to start with creative writing. Dickens shows that characterisation, description and dialogue are essential to engaging our interest as readers. It’s not just about action, as this extract shows:
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”
Why wouldn’t you want to read this novel?!
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