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One day, one page, one sketch of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, published daily at 8:40 AM.

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25There are many themes in the novel. One of theme is guilt. It is one of the main reasons I love the story. The hero, Pip, feels guilty about everything, all the time. He assumes culpability in each relationship, even though he’s always innocent. He takes the guilt of the world on his shoulders.

24To read Great Expectation is to listen to it. Dickens sustains a beautiful lyrical tone in his descriptions of people and places along the entire novel. The prose is very musical. It’s like reading poetry. Mr. Hubble’s wide stance is described on with page in a hilarious yet whimsical way.

22On Sunday I got a little porcelain figurine. It’s a little naked cherub-like young man pushing a wheelbarrow that has a cracked porcelain egg with embedded pink roses on it. The egg opens and the whole thing becomes a small jewelry box. It reminds me of the little white crockery poodles described on this page.

21It’s the highly stressful and quickly paced Christmas scene. Dinner with 6, plus Pip. There is a reference to statues here, a trend in the 13th C. to render knights in statues with their legs crossed. Legs crossed at feet=1 Crusade campaign, crossed at knees=2 Crusades, crossed at thighs=3 Crusades. How do you cross your legs?

19In pre-Victorian days, convicts were given numbers instead of names, to stigmatize them as nonpersons and to keep them from being identified. On the other hand, carriages and hotel rooms were entitled to names instead of digits.

18“No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child’s point of view.” George Orwell.

16This is the first time we meet Compeyson, the man who abandons Miss Havisham on her wedding day. He is the example of everything that was wrong with London at that time. He uses social status to get him out of trouble, and uses friendship and love for his own personal gains. Have things changed that much since then?

15The second sentence of this chapter made me gasp. I had to stop and sketch right then and there. I could not resist the endearing metaphor of the crying goblin. Period.

14A pork pie is a traditional British meat pie. It consists of roughly chopped pork and pork jelly sealed in a hot water crust pastry.It is normally eaten cold as a snack or as part of a meal. There are different gross variations, like the pork and cherry picnic pie. Disgusting.

12A prison hulk is a hulk (empty ship) used as a floating prison. They were produced and used extensively in Great Britain by the Royal Navy. Hulks were used as the temporary holding of persons being transported to Australia and elsewhere overseas. The Queen Mary in Long Beach is also a hulk, a haunted one.

11Tar-water is a Medieval medicine consisting of pine tar and water. It was foul tasting and so slowly dropped in popularity, but was revived in the Victorian era. The physician Cadwallader Colden extolled the virtues of pine resin steeped in water, which he also called “Tar water”. The philosopher George Berkeley also lauded tar water in his tract Siris.