How long does it take to read Great Expectations?
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens takes about 8 hours 50 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 50 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1861. 482 pages, about 132,550 words.
18 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 44 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 50 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 31 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1,489 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman; a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
Subjects: Authors, Benefactors, Bildungsromans, Boys, Child and youth fiction, Coming of age
