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A novel set in England in the first half of the nineteenth century; published in 1860–61.
Charles Dickens
Synopsis
The orphan Pip, a biacksmith's apprentice, harbors aspirations to gentility that are inspired by his love for the disdainful Estella and that are mysteriously supported by an anonymous benefactor.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
The Novel in Focus
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Great Expectations was the penultimate novel completed by the most popular novelist of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Born in Kent, England, in 1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions, Dickens's early life was marked by both humiliation and ambition. Dickens never forgot the period of financial crisis during his childhood, when following his father's bankruptcy, he was taken out of school and forced to work in a shoe-polish warehouse. While the episode was relatively brief, it marked Dickens's later life in many ways: in the development of his own ambitions, in his sympathy for the poor and especially children, and in his outrage at social injustice and bureaucratic heartlessness. Great Expectations, written when Dickens was at the height of his popularity and success, demonstrates all these concerns. His thirteenth novel, it was not overtly autobiographical, as his earlier David Copperfield (1850) had been, but in writing it Dickens employed a first-person narrative that elicits mixed sympathy and judgement for the protagonist Pip, an orphan raised by an abusive elder sister and her saintly husband, a blacksmith. Pip's story invokes an assortment of real-life issues of Victorian England, ranging from its relationship to its colonies, to its imperfect educational system, to its overarching concern with social mobility and status.
For More Information
Carlisle, Janice. "Introduction." Great Expectations. Boston: Bedford, 1996.
Cody, David. "British Empire." The Victorian Web. 1988. http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/history/empire/Empire.html (12 Oct. 2000).
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Ed. Janice Carlisle. Boston: Bedford, 1996.
Everett, Glenn. "Political and Economic History of Great Britain." The Victorian Web. 1987. http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/history/empire/Empire.html (12 Oct. 2000).
Gilmour, Robin. The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel. London: Allen & Unwin, 1981.
Kaplan, Fred. Dickens: A Biography. New York: William Morrow, 1988.
Mitchell, Sally, ed. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1998.
Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and his Publishers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Philips, David. "A New Engine of Power and Authority': The Institutionalization of Law-Enforcement in England 1780–1830." Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500. Ed. V. A. C. Gatrell, et al. London: Europa, 1980.
Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox-Hunting to Whist -the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Rosenberg, Edgar, ed. Great Expectations: A Norton Critical Edition, by Charles Dickens. New York: Norton, 1999.
Tredell, Nicholas, ed. Charles Dickens: Great Expectations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Walder, Dennis. "Reading Great Expectations." Approaching Literature: The Realist Novel. Ed. Dennis Walder. London: Routledge in association with The Open University, 1995.
Literature and Its Times © 1997 Joyce Moss and George Wilson © 2007 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
