How Dickens changed my life

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations

WHEN I was a naïve 19-year-old student reading Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, I did not have many expectations of myself or the book. All I wanted was to survive wading through it, to decipher it, and write a literary response to it, as required by my professor, an all-American man in his 60s.

Prof raved about the book during every lesson for two months, which meant for nearly the entire semester we had to listen to and watch him being smitten by Dickens. But none of us was impressed, I think. Some of my classmates preferred the clean, lean American John Steinbeck; they would secretly read his books to drown out the professor.