Great Expectations

Pip is an orphan in the marsh country, raised by his sister and her blacksmith husband, when an escaped convict frightens him into stealing a file and a pork pie. Then Miss Havisham summons him to a house where every clock has stopped at twenty minutes to nine, the hour she was jilted, and where Estella is being brought up to break hearts. Money arrives from a benefactor Pip is forbidden to ask about. He takes it to London to be made a gentleman. He tells all of it looking back and ashamed, so the long middle is a slow watch: you see the snobbery coming before he does. Dickens wrote two endings and published the second. That is the one here.