Great Expectations
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. The novel is a Bildungsroman and depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person.[N 1] The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861.[1] In October 1861, Chapman & Hall published the novel in three volumes.[2][3][4]
This article is about the Charles Dickens novel. For other uses, see Great Expectations (disambiguation).Author
English
Novel, Bildungsroman
Serialised 1860–61; book form 1861
United Kingdom
544 (first edition 1861)
823.83
PR4560 .A1
The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century[5] and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting 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 and chains, and fights to the death—and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe Gargery, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular with both readers and literary critics,[6][7] has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
The novel was very widely praised.[6] Although Dickens's contemporary Thomas Carlyle referred to it disparagingly as "that Pip nonsense", he nevertheless reacted to each fresh instalment with "roars of laughter".[8] Later, George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, describing it as "all of one piece and consistently truthful".[9] During the serial publication, Dickens was pleased with public response to Great Expectations and its sales;[10] when the plot first formed in his mind, he called it "a very fine, new and grotesque idea".[11]
In the 21st century, the novel retains good standing among literary critics[12] and in 2003 it was ranked 17th on the BBC's The Big Read poll.[13]
Publication history[edit]
In periodicals[edit]
Dickens and Wills co-owned All the Year Round, one 75%, the other 25%. Since Dickens was his own publisher, he did not require a contract for his own works.[60] Although intended for weekly publication, Great Expectations was divided into nine monthly sections, with new pagination for each.[53] Harper's Weekly published the novel from 24 November 1860 to 5 August 1861 in the US and All the Year Round published it from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861 in the UK. Harper's paid £1,000 (equivalent to £119,000 in 2023) for publication rights. Dickens welcomed a contract with Tauchnitz 4 January 1861 for publication in English for the European continent.
Publications in Harper's Weekly were accompanied by forty illustrations by John McLenan;[61] however, this is the only Dickens work published in All the Year Round without illustrations.
Editions[edit]
Robert L Patten identifies four American editions in 1861 and sees the proliferation of publications in Europe and across the Atlantic as "extraordinary testimony" to Great Expectations's popularity.[62] Chapman and Hall published the first edition in three volumes in 1861,[2][3][4] five subsequent reprints between 6 July and 30 October, and a one-volume edition in 1862. The "bargain" edition was published in 1862, the Library Edition in 1864, and the Charles Dickens edition in 1868. To this list, Paul Schlicke adds "two meticulous scholarly editions", one Clarendon Press published in 1993 with an introduction by Margaret Cardwell[63] and another with an introduction by Edgar Rosenberg, published by Norton in 1999.[53] The novel was published with one ending (visible in the four online editions listed in the External links at the end of this article). In some 20th century editions, the novel ends as originally published in 1867, and in an afterword, the ending Dickens did not publish, along with a brief story of how a friend persuaded him to a happier ending for Pip, is presented to the reader (for example, 1987 audio edition by Recorded Books[64]).
In 1862, Marcus Stone,[65] son of Dickens's old friend, the painter Frank Stone, was invited to create eight woodcuts for the Library Edition. According to Paul Schlicke, these illustrations are mediocre yet were included in the Charles Dickens edition, and Stone created illustrations for Dickens's subsequent novel, Our Mutual Friend.[53] Later, Henry Mathew Brock also illustrated Great Expectations and a 1935 edition of A Christmas Carol,[66] along with other artists, such as John McLenan,[67] F. A. Fraser,[68] and Harry Furniss.[69]
Reception[edit]
Robert L. Patten estimates that All the Year Round sold 100,000 copies of Great Expectations each week, and Mudie, the largest circulating library, which purchased about 1,400 copies, stated that at least 30 people read each copy.[70] Aside from the dramatic plot, the Dickensian humour also appealed to readers. Dickens wrote to Forster in October 1860 that "You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in the Tale of Two Cities,"[71] an opinion Forster supports, finding that "Dickens's humour, not less than his creative power, was at its best in this book".[37][72] Moreover, according to Paul Schlicke, readers found the best of Dickens's older and newer writing styles.[6]
Overall, Great Expectations was widely praised,[6] although not all reviews were favourable, however; Margaret Oliphant's review, published May 1862 in Blackwood's Magazine, vilified the novel. Critics in the 19th and 20th centuries hailed it as one of Dickens's greatest successes although often for conflicting reasons: G. K. Chesterton admired the novel's optimism; Edmund Wilson its pessimism; Humphry House in 1941 emphasized its social context. In 1974, Jerome H. Buckley saw it as a Bildungsroman, writing a chapter on Dickens and two of his major protagonists (David Copperfield and Pip) in his 1974 book on the Bildungsroman in Victorian writing.[73] John Hillis Miller wrote in 1958 that Pip is the archetype of all Dickensian heroes.[7] In 1970, Q. D. Leavis suggested "How We Must Read Great Expectations".[74] In 1984, Peter Brooks, in the wake of Jacques Derrida, offered a deconstructionist reading.[75] The most profound analyst, according to Paul Schlicke, is probably Julian Moynahan, who, in a 1964 essay surveying the hero's guilt, made Orlick "Pip's double, alter ego and dark mirror image". Schlicke also names Anny Sadrin's extensive 1988 study as the "most distinguished".[76]
In 2015, the BBC polled book critics outside the UK about novels by British authors; they ranked Great Expectations fourth on the list of the 100 Greatest British Novels.[12] Earlier, in its 2003 poll The Big Read concerning the reading taste of the British public, Great Expectations was voted 17th out of the top 100 novels chosen by survey participants.[13]
Novels influenced by Great Expectations[edit]
Dickens's novel has influenced a number of writers. Sue Roe's Estella: Her Expectations (1982), for example, explores the inner life of an Estella fascinated with a Havisham figure.[163] Miss Havisham is again important in Havisham: A Novel (2013), a book by Ronald Frame, that features an imagining of the life of Miss Catherine Havisham from childhood to adulthood.[164] The second chapter of Rosalind Ashe's Literary Houses (1982) paraphrases Miss Havisham's story, with details about the nature and structure of Satis House and coloured imaginings of the house within.[165] Miss Havisham is also central to Lost in a Good Book (2002), Jasper Fforde's alternative history fantasy novel, which features a parody of Miss Havisham.[166] It won the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association 2004 Dilys Award.[167]
Magwitch is the protagonist of Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997), which is a re-imagining of Magwitch's return to England, with the addition, among other things, of a fictionalised Dickens character and plot-line.[168] Carey's novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1998. Mister Pip (2006), a novel by New Zealand author Lloyd Jones, won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Mister Pip is set in a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a brutal civil war there in the 1990s, where the young protagonist's life is impacted in a major way by her reading of Great Expectations.[169]
In May 2015, Udon Entertainment's Manga Classics line published a manga adaptation of Great Expectations.[170]
Like many other Dickens novels, Great Expectations has been filmed for the cinema or television and adapted for the stage numerous times. The film adaptation in 1946 gained the greatest acclaim.[171] The story is often staged, and less often produced as a musical. The 1939 stage play and the 1946 film that followed from that stage production did not include the character Orlick and ends the story when the characters are still young adults.[172] That character has been excluded in many televised adaptations made since the 1946 movie by David Lean.[172] Following are highlights of the adaptations for film and television, and for the stage, since the early 20th century.
