And the I'm going to be. Welcome to this newscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep.

On this newscast, we read excerpts from Public Domain Works as well as original stories. We'd like to thank our listeners. If you enjoy our show,

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This episode is brought to you by Puppy Piles.

Tonight, I'll be reading a snoozy opening

to Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations is the 13th novel by Charles Dickens

and one of his last completed novels. It depicts the personal growth and personal

development of an orphan nicknamed PIP.

It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in a periodical between

1860 and 1861 and shortly thereafter was published as a novel.

It's set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens most memorable scenes. Let's get cozy.

get cozy.

close your body. eyes.

body into the softness of your bed.

Now take a few deep breaths. Chapter 1, my father's family name being Pier Up and my Christian name Philip. My infant

tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than PIP. So I called myself PIP and came to be called

PIP. I gave PIR-Up as my father's family name on the authority of his tombstone and my sister, Mrs.

Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother and never saw any

likeness of either of them for their days were long before the days of photographs. My first fancies recording what they were like

were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my fathers gave me an odd idea that he was a

square, stout, dark man with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, also Georgiana, wife of the above, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.

...