Silk Road Rising’s Great Expectations is less a morality tale than a tale of easy moralizing

Theater Review | Chicago Reader: Charles Dickens wrote only two of his 15 novels in the first person: David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Both are semiautobiographical and centrally concerned with class mobility. But in key ways they're mirror images of each other. David Copperfield, published in 1850, charts the title character's fulfilling progress from poverty to fortune, his talent and determination bringing him success and happiness. Great Expectations, published a decade later, focuses on young, impoverished Pip—equally talented and determined—whose efforts to better his station bring him mostly anguish, doubt, and a crushing loss of self. Not only that, in Dickens's original version of the story, he doesn't even get the girl.