Great Expectations

"Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard, that you should be above work."

One of the cleanest double-reverse plots in English: the convict-benefactor revelation collapses Miss Havisham's apparent patronage and reframes every London chapter, so plot scores 92.

It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had taken it up. So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper.

Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Joe, Estella, and the Pocket/Wemmick orbit are tonally distinct and linger; the stopped-clock bride at cards is Dickens's cast design in one tableau, so cast scores 92.

"He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!" said Estella with disdain, before our first game was out. "And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!" I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair.

The marshes opening accelerates into being; London chapters dilate but Pip's growing unease and Miss Havisham's pyromania reset tempo before the second-half reversal, so pace scores 88.

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. 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.

One of the great first-person voices in English: retrospective vernacular, tombstone-letter fantasy, and marshes vocabulary bind autobiography into a single frame, so prose scores 94.

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.

Kentish marshes, Rochester, London chambers, and Satis House give documentary density; the churchyard-to-river geography anchors class and self-invention in place, so world scores 86.

"Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!" A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones.

Ch.I — Pip by the tombstones, then the convict rising from among the graves — is one of the strongest opening hooks in the canon; menace and tenderness bind the reader in under a thousand words, so hook scores 94.

"You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?" "Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis." "What is your real name?" I asked him in a whisper. "Magwitch," he answered, in the same tone; "chrisen'd Abel."

Established the first-person retrospective Bildungsroman as the form for modern class and self-invention; the convict-benefactor reversal has been imitated by virtually every English coming-of-age novel since, so innov scores 90.

"I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends." I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

The Satis House garden meeting turns the entire plot into a single ethical meditation on pride, gratitude, and return; the closing image is one of the most-quoted English-novel endings, so ending scores 92.