Great Expectations

About this book

Great Expectations is Charles Dickens’s thirteenth novel and his second written in the first person, after David Copperfield. He began it in late 1860 to boost the sales of All the Year Round, which were falling under a serial by another author, and it ran in the magazine in weekly installments. The format forced Dickens to write more economically than in his monthly-part novels, and the result is one of his most focused books.

It is widely regarded as one of Dickens’s best, and it is among the most commonly taught of his novels. The appeal is partly the narrator, Pip, whose account of his own vanity and ingratitude is unusually honest, and partly a gallery of characters, among them Miss Havisham and Magwitch, who have become part of the common stock of English literature.

The story

Pip is a young orphan raised by his harsh older sister and her kind husband, Joe Gargery, a blacksmith, in the marsh country of Kent. On Christmas Eve, visiting his parents’ graves, he is seized by an escaped convict who demands food and a file. Pip steals both from home and brings them, and the convict is recaptured soon after.

Not long after, Pip is summoned to Satis House to entertain Miss Havisham, a wealthy recluse who stopped all the clocks on the day she was jilted and still wears her wedding dress. There he meets her adopted daughter Estella, who is beautiful and cold and whom Pip comes to love without hope. Years later a London lawyer, Jaggers, arrives with the news that an anonymous benefactor intends to make Pip a gentleman. Pip assumes he knows who the benefactor is and leaves for London, and the rest of the novel follows what his expectations do to him.

Themes and historical context

The novel is set in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a generation before it was written, and it looks hard at the Victorian idea of the gentleman. Pip’s rise brings him money, manners, and shame about his origins, and Dickens traces how the people who treated him well are the ones he learns to be embarrassed by. Where the money comes from, and what Pip owes to the person who provides it, is the question the book turns on.

Criminality runs through the novel. The marshes face the prison hulks, convicts are transported to Australia, Jaggers’s law office sits beside Newgate, and respectable London turns out to be bound to the criminal world in ways Pip does not expect. Dickens, whose father had been imprisoned for debt, returns here to his lifelong interest in the thin line between the respectable and the disgraced.

Dickens originally wrote a bleaker final scene, then revised it before publication on the advice of his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Both endings survive and are often printed together, and the choice between them has been debated ever since.

Who should read it

Great Expectations runs to around 185,000 words in fifty-nine chapters. The pace is steady rather than fast, but the first-person narration keeps it moving, and the early chapters on the marshes are among the most vivid Dickens wrote. The language is mid-Victorian and the humor dry. It is a good choice for readers who found Dickens’s longer novels unwieldy, for anyone who enjoys coming-of-age stories, and for readers interested in questions of class and money.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #1400 was prepared by an anonymous volunteer and David Widger. It gives the revised ending that Dickens published.