Despite any literary controversy over Dickens' style, most critics agree that Great Expectations is his best book. The story, while set in the early part of the 1800s, was written in 1860 during the Victorian era that began with the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 and lasted until her death in 1901. Virtues emphasized at that time included integrity, respectability, a sense of public duty, and maintaining a close-knit family.
The period of the novel was a time of change. England was expanding worldwide and becoming a wealthy world power. The economy was changing from a mainly agricultural one to an industrial and trade-based one. With increasing technological changes came clashes with religion, and increasing social problems. Machines were making factories more productive, yet raw sewage spilled into London streets — people lived in terrible conditions as slums lined the banks of the Thames. Children as young as five were being forced to work twelve and thirteen hours a day at a poverty wage.
While the world became more democratic, so, too, did literature. Unlike the romantic literature that preceded it — literature that focused on the glories of the upper classes — Victorian literature focused on the masses. The people wanted characters, relationships, and social concerns that mattered to them, and they had the economic power to demand it. Novels were published in magazines in serial form — in ten or twenty weekly or monthly installments — and if readers didn't care for a particular story, circulation dropped and the magazine lost money. Consequently, magazines worked hard to keep their readers interested, in suspense, and buying the next copy. Dickens published Great Expectations in weekly installments that ran from December 1860 until August 1861.
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.
The locations of the story are in London or on the marshes around Kent, near the junction of the Rivers Thames and Medway. These are areas that Dickens knew well. His happiest childhood years were spent in Chatham on the eastern coast. Nearby were marshes, the prison hulks, and convicts. Also, he lived in London for years and knew the back streets, markets, and places like Newgate Prison.
The sense of location in the novel is one of its strongest points. Dickens' imagery when describing area and place is powerful — as George Orwell suggests, his "power of evoking visual images . . . has probably never been equaled. When Dickens has once described something you see it for the rest of your life."
The story has a three-part structure similar to that of a play, which is fitting, given that Dickens was involved in the theater for many years, writing, producing, and acting in plays. The first part of the story covers Pip's childhood from the time he meets the convict in the graveyard until the time he receives his expectations; the second examines his young manhood, learning to become a gentleman and living extravagantly in London; and finally, the third part visits Pip in his adulthood, from the time he tries to help Magwitch escape until his return from Egypt at the end of the story. The three parts in this story have a moral implication as well as time and space implications. Pip's childhood is viewed as a time of innocence and goodness while living in the Garden of Eden. His young manhood is the fall from grace when he sins and must seek an end to his suffering, and his adulthood is seen as a time of redemption when he achieves forgiveness and inner peace.
The plot is complicated and twisting, full of surprises and complexities (part of the requirement of keeping magazine audiences interested from week–to-week). Dickens includes a tremendous number of and detail for his characters, and although some critical reviewers have suggested that his characters were one-dimensional, out of control, and therefore not true representations of real people, reviewer Thomas Connolly suggests that Dickens was at a high point for character development in Great Expectations: "Dickens had learned how to make his characters complex so that they function economically both in the basic plot and in the thematic presentation."
Other elements to be aware of include Dickens' use of humor and satire, irony, repetition to create tension, and the use of inanimate objects to convey emotion.
You can find multitudes of interpretations as to what the novel "means;" however, most reviewers place the major themes of the novel into three broad categories: moral, psychological, and social.
Moral themes include good versus evil, moral redemption from sin, wealth and its equal power to help or corrupt, personal responsibility, and the awareness and acceptance of consequences from one's choices. Psychological themes, explored through Pip's personal and moral growth, include abandonment, guilt, shame, desire, secrecy, gratitude, ambition, and obsession/emotional manipulation versus real love. Social themes that show up in the book include class structure and social rules, snobbery, child exploitation, the corruption and problems of the educational and legal systems, the need for prison reform, religious attitudes of the time, the effect of the increasing trade and industrialization on people's lives, and the Victorian work ethic (or lack thereof). With regard to work, it is interesting that the story takes place in people's "off time." Rarely is anyone ever shown working, especially the gentlemen of the story. Herbert seems to be able to take a lot of time off from work to do things with Pip. George Orwell attributes this to Dickens' Victorian view of life. A gentlemen, in Dickens' view, should strive to get a lot of money, then settle down in an ivy-covered house with servants and children all around. The desire is complete idleness except for the activities of sitting around the fire talking to friends, eating, or making more children. Cultural trends aside, the turbulence, abandonment, and insecurity of his childhood years no doubt made the theme of family hearth and home a strong one for Dickens.
An additional feature of Great Expectations is its autobiographical nature. H.M. Daleski, in his book on Dickens, notes that Great Expectations is "one of Dickens' most personal novels . . . it bears the marks of his own cravings to an unusual degree." Before writing the novel Dickens reread his autobiographical story, David Copperfield. While one object of this rereading was to avoid duplication in his new novel, Dickens was also reviewing his life at age forty-eight. In David Copperfield, Dickens focused on his own self-pity for his humble beginnings and his pride in rising above the shoe-polish factory to fame and wealth. Great Expectations, however, has a more mature analysis of life. Pip and Dickens undergo a humbling self-analysis that results in the wisdom that fortune does not equal personal happiness.
There are some differences between Dickens and Pip, though. While Pip never earns his fortune, Dickens did. Dickens worked intensely throughout his life while Pip rather has an aversion to working too hard. Also, Dickens loved his work, working passionately in his writing and theatrical pursuits. Pip seems fairly unemotional when describing his work with Herbert's firm — to him, it is a means to survive — and he lacks passion for anything in the novel except Estella, and even with her, his emotions are repressed, rather the antithesis of Dickens' and his fire for life.
