In keeping with the desire to please readers, Dickens, on the advice of a novelist friend, changed the ending of the story from a sad one to a happy one. The different ending has been a point of controversy for readers and literary critics ever since. George Bernard Shaw felt the happy ending was an "outrage," especially because "apart from this the story is the most perfect of Dickens' works." Controversy aside, Great Expectations — with the happy ending — was a major success for both Dickens and his magazine.
In July, 1861, Great Expectations was published in book form in three separate volumes, corresponding to the three stages of Pip's growth in the novel. It was published as a single-volume book in November 1862. (The chapter summaries and commentaries later in this Note give both the modern chapter numbers and the original volume and chapter numbers from the three-volume-set. The first volume had nineteen chapters while the second and third had twenty chapters each.)
The story is written as a first-person story, and most consider it a retrospective one — Pip, as an older man, telling his life's story and commenting on it along the way. However, the narrator's voice sometimes gets confusing, almost as if the younger Pip is talking. John Lucas, in his book, The Melancholy Man: A Study of Dickens' Novels, says: "There are essentially two points of view in Great Expectations. One is that of Pip who lives through the novel, the other belongs to the Pip who narrates it. And the second point of view is the authoritative one, commenting on, correcting, judging the earlier self (or selves)." Whether one or two Pips, the choice of first person is an effective one. It has a confidential, confessional quality, as if Pip is talking from his heart while sitting and drinking coffee with the reader.
