GREAT EXPECTATIONS

 

On 1 December 1860 Charles Dickens's Great Expectations began serialization in the December 1 issue of "All the Year Round."

One of Charles Dickens’s most fascinating novels, Great Expectations follows the orphan Pip as he leaves behind a childhood of misery and poverty after an anonymous benefactor offers him a chance at the life of a gentleman. From the young Pip’s first terrifying encounter with the convict Magwitch in the gloom of a graveyard to the splendidly morbid set pieces in Miss Havisham’s mansion to the magnificently realized boat chase down the Thames, the novel is filled with the transcendent excitement that Charles Dickens could so abundantly provide. Written in 1860, at the height of his maturity, it also reveals the novelist’s bittersweet understanding of the extent to which our deepest moral dilemmas are born of our own obsessions and illusions.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Great Expectations is a bildungsroman which depicts the personal growth and emotional development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Charles Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. It was first published as a serial in Charles Dickens's weekly periodical  All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861,  the novel was published in three volumes.

It is set  in the misty marshes of Kent,  and in London, in the early to mid-1800s, and contains some memorable scenes, such as the opening, in a graveyard, where the young Pip is approached by the escaped prisoner, Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of intense imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a variegated cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the spectral  Miss Havisham,  and the cold and gorgeous Estella. The themes of the novel include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the final triumph of good over evil. Charles Dickens felt Great Expectations was his best work, calling it "a very fine idea".

 LitCharts  - Great Expectations Study Guide

SparkNotes  -  Great Expectations

Studying Great Expectations

Themes in Great Expectations 

Film Education  -  Great Expectations