书名：Great Expectations 远大前程
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1150
作者：Charles Dickens查尔斯·狄更斯
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2009
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451531186
商品尺寸：10.8 x 2.2 x 17.6 cm
包装：简装
页数：510 （以实物为准）

Great Expectations《远大前程》（孤星血泪）是英国作家查尔斯·狄更斯于1860年到1861年创作的长篇小说，问世百余年来经久不衰，被多次改编成电影、电视剧及舞台剧，深受不同时代的读者喜爱，埃德加·约翰逊曾高度赞扬这部小说，认为《远大前程》在“狄更斯所有作品中结构和语言都堪称是完美的。本书适合狄更斯爱好者或英国文学爱好者品读。
推荐理由：
1.《远大前程》是狄更斯的晚期作品，作者将其丰富的人生阅历和成熟的思想认识都汇聚在这部作品中，被认为是狄更斯思想上成熟作品之一，不可不读；
2.地道英式英语，无删减，有利于扩大词汇量和提高语感；
3.文笔巧妙，描写细致入微，语言优美，小说中有较多的名言佳句，对英文写作有较大帮助。
Perhaps Dickens’s best-loved work,Great Expectations is a powerful and moving novel suffused with the author’s memories of the past and its grip on the present.
One of the most popular novelists ever, Charles Dickens wrote about what he saw in 19th century London: orphans, child labor, and the crime that was rampant in the city at the time. In the 1861 bestseller Great Expectations, he wove all of these themes into a tale of mystery and personal development. The story of a young orphan boy—poor and alone, but whisked away to London by a anonymous benefactor—is a fantastic tale, complete with plot twists and a love story that puts many modern novels to shame. To this day,Great Expectations remains one of Dickens’s greatest achievements.
With an Introduction by Stanley Weintraub and an Afterword by Annabel Davis-Goff 

孤儿匹普从小由姐姐抚养，受雇于贵族郝薇香，并且爱上了她的养女艾丝黛拉，一心想成为“上等人”。他小时候好心搭救的一名逃犯在国外发财致富，为报答救命之恩，巧妙安排他去伦敦接受上等教育，进入上流社会。然而命运并不与匹普的希望接轨：艾丝黛拉另嫁他人，逃犯被擒，遗产充公，匹普的“远大前程”转眼化为泡影。
Charles Dickens’sGreat Expectations is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mystery and a profound examination of moral values.An orphan living with his older sister and her kindly husband, Pip is hired by wealthy and embittered Miss Havisham as a companion for her and her beautiful adopted daughter, Estella. His years in service to the Havishams fill his heart with the desire to rise above his station in life. Pip’s wish is fulfilled when a mysterious benefactor provides him with“great expectations” — the means to be tutored as a gentleman.
Thrust into London’s high-society circles, Pip grows accustomed to a life of leisure, only to find himself lacking as a suitor competing for Estella’s favor. After callously discarding everything he once valued for his own selfish pursuits, Pip learns the identity of his patron—a revelation that shatters his very soul.

查尔斯·狄更斯（Charles Dickens，1812～1870），1812年生于英国的朴次茅斯。15岁时，狄更斯在一家律师事务所当抄写员并学习速记，此后，又在报社任新闻记者。在《记事晨报》任记者时，狄更斯开始发表一些具有讽刺和幽默内容的短剧，主要反映伦敦的生活，逐渐有了名气。他了解城市底层人民的生活和风土人情，这些都体现在他热情洋溢的笔端。此后，他在不同的杂志社任编辑、主编和发行人，其间发表了几十部长篇和短篇小说，主要作品有The Pickwick Papers《匹克威克外传》、Oliver Twist《雾都孤儿》、The Old Curiosity Shop《老古玩店》、Hard Times《艰难时世》、Our Mutual Friend《我们共同的朋友》、A Tale of Two Cities《双城记》等。
As a child, Charles Dickens (1812–70) came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A surprise legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success through Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.
Stanley Weintraub is the author or editor of more than fifty books of biography, culture history, and military history, includingThe London Yankees, Whistler, Victoria, and Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert. He retired from Pennsylvania State University as Evan Hugh Professor Emeritus and director of Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies.
Annabel Davis-Goff is the author of The Dower House, This Cold Country, and The Fox’s Walk. All three novels were selected by the New York Times as Notable Books. She is also the author of Walled Gardens, a family memoir, and iseditor of The Literary Companion to Gambling. She now teaches literature at Bennington College.

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.  
I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave,
and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine, who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle, I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers—pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.
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 Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; 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.