Great Expectations

Great Expectations is the first famous adult novel Mrs. Phelps recommends to four-year-old Matilda at the Village Library. Its considerable length and adult readership make Matilda’s choice to tackle it—and her swift completion of the book—a striking measure of her reading ability and appetite.

Recommendation and Choice

Mrs. Phelps offers the novel as a famous, very good book, while allowing that she can find something shorter and easier if it proves too long. Matilda reads its title and author, Charles Dickens, and eagerly accepts the chance to try it. The recommendation gives her the freedom to meet a substantial adult novel on her own terms rather than steering her toward an easier book because of her age.

Matilda’s Reading

Over the following afternoons, Matilda sits in a large armchair at the other side of the room, with the heavy book resting on her lap because she cannot comfortably hold it. She bends over the pages and reads with sustained concentration, absorbed in Pip’s adventures and the old woman in the cobweb-filled house. Her only movement is an occasional hand raised to turn a page. Mrs. Phelps watches her hour after hour and regrets having to interrupt her when it is time to leave.

Completion and Significance

Matilda finishes the edition within a week. It contains 411 pages, but she tells Mrs. Phelps that she loved it and immediately asks whether Dickens wrote other books. Her response makes the novel more than a test of endurance: completing it leads directly to a desire to continue reading its author. The contrast between the book’s weight, length, and adult reputation and Matilda’s quiet, absorbed reading establishes both her precocious capacity and the seriousness with which she approaches books.