I was taken, in my New York days, by a girl named Estella, who insisted that I read Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” because she was named after the character in the novel.

I didn’t get very far with the book or Estella, and abandoned both. Make of that what you will.

I just finished three chapters of Steven Knight’s “Peaky Blinders” new version of the Dickens’ classic, and I’m not sure I’ll continue.

I’ve never been a vivid fan of Dickens, and I’m too old now, I think, to embrace him.

I recall watching two or three earlier versions of “Great Expectations,” and I never found myself excited.

Watching Knight’s new “Great Expectations” now streaming, I find myself a tad more engaged, mostly because of Dan Atherton and Kate Reid’s superb camera work.

I liked the early parts of Pip’s childhood, especially the graveyards and beaches, where Pip was assaulted by escaped convict Magwitch (Johnny Harris) who forced him to get some tools and cut away his chains.

Stay tuned, Magwitch later stands at the center of the story.

I know I would have continued with the John Mill’s “Great Expectations” version from 1946 had it had Knight’s cast which includes Sara, (Hayley Squires) Harris’s Magwitch, young Pip (Tom Sweet) and Fionn Whitehead as the older Pip, and certainly the multi-talented Olivia Colman as the Gothic Miss Havisham, a part played in various stages of fraught by Margaret Leighton in 1974, Joan Hickson in 1981, and Jean Simmons, who played a young Estella in 1946, also played Miss Havisham in 1989.

But Colman in Knight’s version is a really cool, campy, drug version that is both compelling and disturbing to watch. Give it a look.

She takes the whole batty discarded lover thing as far downstage to the footlights as she is allowed.

She twists her six strands of pearls, then played with the wispy layers of lace on her decade’s old wedding gown that she wore when some lout, after her fortune, robbed her and left her alone in this Alfred Hitchcock musty old gated mansion.

Didn’t Anthony Perkins in “Psycho” have his own Miss Havisham in his bedroom?? Kidding.

You’ll love the stuff in part one when Estella (Shalom Brune-Franklin) is assigned, I think, to seduce young Pip into a new, complicated and scary life.

There is more to see of Estelle in upcoming sequences.

There is something for everyone in Knight’s version, especially for the very hip: opium afternoons with Estella and Havisham, blindfold games laced with sexual asides by the Madam, sadistic whippings with a hot poker, played by Pip’s sister Sara and a willing Mr. Pumblechuck.

I keep thinking, why didn’t Bette Davis every give Havisham a go?

“Great Exceptions” streams on Netflix, Hulu and Prime.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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