Remember when all you needed was a cool business card for cocktail parties? Now social status is determined in a hundred ways that all come with their own pressures-how many Twitter followers do you have? How many facebook page likes? How much traffic does your site get? Are you speaking? Traveling? How full is your inbox? While pressure has always been there, in many ways that pressure is more public than ever. The world is both bigger and smaller today. With access to so much media and so quickly, we know everything that's going on in the world. We are bombarded with possibilities and opportunities. It seems like we have limitless choices. It's easy to feel like your life is small, that you aren't doing enough, that other lives, careers, and even cities are more exciting than yours. The challenge today is, with limitless public pressure on how your life measures up against everyone else's, how do you find contentment in this context? Join Claire Diaz-Ortiz, an author, speaker, and Twitter employee, in this Barna Frame as she explores this timely issue.

Catherine Havisham was born into privilege. Handsome, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer, and lives in luxury in Satis House. But she is never far from the smell of hops and the arresting letters on the brewhouse wall -- Havisham. A reminder of all she owes to the family name and the family business.

An enterprising adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic that begins in the English coastal marshes, and features the famous Pip and Estella, Miss Haversham and Magwitch.

One of the most celebrated and influential novels of the past two centuries tells the vivid and unforgettable coming-of-age story of the orphan Pip In the marsh country of Victorian England, young Pip lives with his sister and her husband, the kindly blacksmith Joe, eking out a hardscrabble life. Pip’s one true aspiration is to apprentice for Joe and become a blacksmith himself, a dream that sustains him and gives him hope. But though he doesn’t know it, Pip’s fates are about to turn. Alone in a graveyard one night, he encounters a grizzled and mud-smeared escaped convict. Dragging a heavy shackle from an injured leg, the man demands that Pip steal him food and help him remove the clanging iron. Cowed, Pip accommodates his commands without resistance. It isn’t until years later, after Pip has forged a tender relationship with the eccentric Mrs. Havisham, fallen into unexpected prosperity in London, and found himself gripped by love for the charming-yet-fickle Estella, that the true consequences of that night in the graveyard finally come to light. Celebrated for its vibrant characters, engrossing plot, and universal themes of ambition and hope, Great Expectations stands as a pillar of Victorian literature and a preeminent entry in the Dickensian oeuvre. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

This book unpicks the strategy, policy and culture that has supported the social mobility success story of one of the UK′s leading schools, the London Academy of Excellence. It distils this into universal concepts and ideas that school leaders, in any context, can consider for their own schools.

The negotiation of expectations in tourism is a complex and dynamic process – one that is central to the imagination of cultural difference. Expectations not only affect the lives and experiences of tourists, but also their hosts, and play an important part in the success or failure of the overall tourism experience. It is for this reason, the authors argue, that special attention should be given to how expectations constitute and sustain tourism. The case studies presented here explore what fuels the desires to visit particular places, to what degree expectations inform the experience of the place, and the frequent disjunctions between tourist expectations and experiences. Careful attention is paid to how the imagination of the visitor inspires the imagination of the host, and vice-versa; how tourists and host communities actively imagine, re-imagine, and shape each other’s lives. This realization, has profound consequences, not solely for academic analysis, but for all those who participate in and work within the tourism industry.

Among all the genres of literature, the novel has always held a fascination for the readers over the centuries. Rightly so, because it tells a story in a gripping and dramatic style, which often reminds them of their lives, sometimes transporting them into an imaginary world of entertainment and escape, and enabling them to forget their worries and concerns. The 19th century England was prodigious for the production of novels with such luminaries as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, the famous Bronte sisters—Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte and Emily Bronte—George Eliot and Thomas Hardy adorning the horizon. Among these, Dickens certainly holds a pride of place: his prodigious writings, predominantly novels, and his inimitable style bear testimony to this. The child figure is ubiquitous in all his novels—from Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son to Hard Times and Great Expectations. The child is sometimes the victim and sometimes the reminder of the innocence lost in a materialistic world. Great Expectations is a fascinating novel told with remarkable drama, humour and irony. It is a gripping story, the story of Pip, the orphan boy adopted by Mr. Joe Gragery, a blacksmith. Pip has both good luck and great expectations; but then he loses both. Through his rise and fall, Pip learns how to find happiness and, in the process, falls in love. Pip is neither a hero nor an antihero. He is just an ordinary human being who experiences myriad emotions—fright, love, grief, misery and happiness. As in his other novels, Dickens draws memorable and haunting characters in this novel, too, and also exposes the rampant corruption prevalent during the period. Besides a comprehensive Preface by the Editor, the book gives the actual text, followed by specially written critical essays on the novel by experts in the field, each offering insights on different aspects of narrative, themes and culture. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of English Literature as well as researchers in the field should find this book extremely useful and immensely readable.

Charles Dickens’ second novel, Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress, was first published as a serial (in monthly instalments) in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839. The novel was inspired by Robert Blincoe’s account of his childhood spent in a cotton mill. Oliver Twist, an orphan, is born in a workhouse and later sold off into an apprenticeship. Dickens situates his protagonist amid the squalid lives of beggars, criminals and petty thieves. Trapped in a world of corruption and poverty, Oliver with his pure heart is rewarded with a fairytale ending. The dark reality of child labour, the effects of industrialisation and the condition of orphans in London in the mid-19th century form the crux of Dickens’ heart-rending novel. Great Expectations revolves around the life of an orphan nicknamed Pip. The novel, set in the 19th century, traces the psychological growth of Pip in three stages: his childhood in the marshes of Kent, his journey from the rural environs to the London metropolis, and finally his reluctant reconciliation with the vanity of false promises and values. The cast includes the cold yet ethereal Estella, the kind-hearted blacksmith Joe, the ‘pale young gentleman’ Herbert Pocket and the affluent, eccentric spinster Miss Havisham, among others. George Bernard Shaw said of the novel, ‘All of one piece and consistently truthful.’