Michael Rosen's story about Great Expectations

My father read this to us in a tent near the North York Moors when I was 13. I can remember it being a moment where I first had a sense that a novel is often about someone's passage through society and that this isn't easy or uncomplicated. My father was brilliant at voices - especially London ones. One moment he could do Magwitch as a rough, threatening character, the next the forlorn and posh Miss Havisham, the haughty Estelle and so on. His favourite was Jaggers, though with his peremptory dealings with Pip. I remember wishing that I could one and the same time be someone who could act and read and do voices like my father but also be someone who could write as brilliantly as Dickens. This is a book that brilliantly expresses the way in which we all alter our views of ourselves as we get older. The book has an older Pip looking at how a younger Pip behaved and thought, so we are constantly toing and froing between a young Pip and an old Pip. There's no sentimentality in this. At times the older Pip is rueful, others embarrassed. And just as there is with our own memories, there's something helpless about it: you can't change the past. You did those stupid, crass things.

Eventually the young Pip 'catches up' with the old Pip and this is a moment where we might hope for wisdom, or happiness or resolution. Dickens wrote two endings for the book, and I much prefer the unresolved one. The neat and tidy resolved version makes Pip appear too 'right', too 'correct' in the outcome of his journey and development. I think it's much more human (and humane) to have him unable to control his circumstances in the way that he would most like.