Great Expectations

1860-1861 (serialized) ; Charles Dickens

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel; a bildungsroman novel depicting the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed "Pip." It is Dickens’ second novel, after David Copperfield, fully narrated in first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens’ weekly periodical, All the Year Round, from December 1, 1860-August 1861. In October 1861 Chapman & Hall published the novel in three volumes.

The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-Nineteenth Century and contains some of Dickens’ most memorable scenes, including the opening in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery—poverty, prison ships, chains, and fights to the death—and has a colorful cast of characters who have indubitably entered popular culture: These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens’ themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations (popular with readers and literary critics) boasts many translations into various languages and adaptations into various media.

Upon its release the novel received near universal acclaim, although Thomas Carlyle spoke disparagingly of “all that Pip's nonsense.” Later, George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, as “All of one piece and consistently truthful.” During the serial publication, Dickens was pleased with public response to Great Expectations and its sales; when the plot first formed in his mind, he called it “a very fine, new, and grotesque idea.”