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Dickens reworks his own childhood once again as a first-person narrative in Great

Expectations, his thirteenth novel but only his second use of this highly subjective narrative

point-of-view the first beingDavid Copperfield(1849-50), which encorporates the

autobiographical fragment that Dickens never published. Unlike his earlier picaresque young

heroes such as Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit, Pip (more properly, Philip Pirrip)and David are fully-developed, 'round' characters. Just as a child would, Dickens divides his

settings and characters in both novels into the categories of secure" and threatening." But

Dickens continues to prize distinctiveness in the drawing of the supporting characters.

Uniqueness of identity in both major and minor characters makes the relatively 'flat' hero and

heroine seem normal by comparison to such odd ducks as Orlick and Wemmick. As in the

earlier, looser works such asThe Pickwick Papers(1837) Dickens uses natural dialogue to

reveal character subtly and indirectly.

Critics such as biographer Fred Kaplan have repeatedly pointed out that Pip and David

are portraits of the novelist as a young man, something that the similarity in the initials of the

novelist hero of the 1851 novel suggest. The futile love affair with Estella bright, anddistant, and cold as the stars for which he has named her reflects young Dickens' own

hopeless infatuation with a banker's daughter, Maria Beadnell. Significantly, in the original

ending Dickens did not reward Pip for his struggles by arranging the traditional happy ending

for the lovers.

In his novels Dickens sees the chief problem in life as being people's failing to

understand one another clearly, to see the emotional and spiritual reality beneath the surface.

This problem is reflected in such matters as the harshness of employers, the disinterestedness

of government, the biases of the penal and justice systems--in short, the sheer inhumanity of

British social institutions. What is a gentleman, what is true gentility?" are the questions

Dickens poses his reader in Great Expectations . He shows the development of Pip from an

innocent, unsophisticated orphan to a pseudo- aristocrat and snob tinged by the taint of the

prison house. The desire of the animalistic and brutal Orlick for personal vengeance reflects

what Dickens sees as the fearful revolutionary potentialities of the masses so well exemplified

by that tigress Madame Defarge in his previous novel inAll the Year Round,A Tale of Two

Cities(1859). Estella, cold and distant as the stars that hold the mysteries of our fates, makes

Pip painfully aware of his humble condition and motivates him to strive to be something

better, worthier of her love (which she can never bestow). Perhaps both learn their social-

climbing at Satis House, and then demonstrate that they have unlearned those childhood

lessons in the final scene there, in the revised ending that novelist Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer-

Lyttonand Dickens's mistress, Ellen Ternan (perhaps a model for Estella) preferred.

Wholesale trade was finally considered genteel in the second half of the nineteenth

century--as is the case with the proud, haughty Miss Havisham, a brewery heiress who fancies

herself an aristocrat. Pip begins with iron chains at Joe's forge but yearns for golden chains,

those which also bind Miss Havisham to her past and her thirst for vengeance. At the close of

Ch. 19 Pip changes clothes (an act symbolic of his changing class) and leaves his true friends,

Biddy and Joe, for the vain and superficial society of London. Like Martin Chuzzlewit in

the1843 picaresque novel, Pip leaves the unspoiled countryside for a city of filth, crime, and

oppression. However, Pip becomes a gentleman only in the true sense when he learns from

the mouth of his benefactor the actual source of his great expectations; he proves his

fundamental humanity by deciding to assist Magwitch, his great-hearted fairy- godfather whois to Pip what Miss Havisham is to Estella. Abel Magwitch, victim of the aristocratic and

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depraved Compeyson (Cain?), is Dickens' s indictment of nineteenth-century British society's

callous disregard for the welfare of the lower orders. From him Pip unlearns the lessons of

Miss Havisham, Jaggers, and Wemmick; once again he values people for what they are rather

than for their 'portable property' and pocketbooks. The central plot-- with its secrets that

Magwitch is responsible for Pip's fortune and that he is Estella's father--is obscured by

surprisingly few digressions; the book's action is tight and well-knit, owing in part perhaps toits weekly as opposed to Dickens's usual monthly serial structure. Like its weekly-serialised

brethren,Hard Times(1854) andA Tale of _____. (1859), the 1861 novel has fewer characters

and little subplotting. Expectations and exploitation are its organizing and unifying motiffs.

And, like its weekly-serialised brethren, Great Expectations lacks both the exuberance

and melodrama of Dickens' s earlier, picaresque works. Rigorously maintaining the first-

person point-of-view (rather than his avuncular, Fieldingesque point of view of so evident in

earlier works such asMartin Chuzzlewit), Dickens deftly suggests a small boy's perspective in

the childhood section by limiting himself strictly to what a child would see and feel. The

opening is especially effective in this regard, as the convict turns both Pip and his small world

of marshes and dykes upside-down.The scene between the two fellow- victims (Magwitch, avictim of legal and social injustice, an escapee from the hulks; Pip, an orphan only

temporarily free of the dictatorship of his sister when he visits his parents' grave) is

sensational and dramatic because of the strongly-sensed undercurrent of violence and menace

below the humorous, initially- tranquil surface. Magwitch presents Pip with a moral and

physical dilemma. Joe, Mrs. Joe, and Biddy present him with a choice of adult characters to

emulate. Uncle (in effect, step-father) Joe and Mrs. Joe's Uncle Pumblechook, artisan and

merchant, present Pip with value choices. Joe is animated by the doctrine of love, Miss

Havisham by that of hate. Matthew and Herbert Pocket repeat the selfless kindness and

companionship of Biddy and Joe. These characters constitute Pip's social environment: we

note that, although an orphan, Pip has no shortage of step-fathers and step- mothers.

Through them Pip must learn how to achieve human happiness. Through them Dickens

shows how from infancy the individual is oppressed, moulded, and channelled into his adult

identity: The Child is father of the Man" (Wordsworth). Satis House and London are a

complementary microcosm and macrocosm. Dickens's symbols generally and of the world-as-

prison metaphor in particular involve mud, dust, gardens, seeds, the courts, and the river. He

contrasts the purity of the Thames in the marsh country, at its mouth, with its pollution and

corruption in the metropolis. Dickens' s ability to build suspense through adapting the devices

of the late eighteenth-century's Gothic novel (the eerie setting, the child or young woman in

danger, the evil and deformed monster, the plausive and villainous aristocrat, the nightmare,

and so on) has served as a model for later novelists. Dickens uses the persecution andexploitation of children and the theatricality of funerals to build pathos.

However, Dickens is best remembered, perhaps, for his ability to create humour out of

farce, nonsense, lampoon, slapstick, and satire, using such stock types as the drunk, the

eccentric, the ham actor, the buffoon, the paltroon, the hypocrite, the mercenary physician and

his accomplice, the undertaker, and such subjects as education, child abuse and neglect, and

keeping up with the Joneses. In On Some Aspects of the Comic in Great Expectations

( Victorian Newsletter42, Fall 1972) Henri Talon proposes that the style of humour in this

novel differs from that of Dickens's earlier works in that here humour is an aspect of the first-

person perspective:

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The detachment that comic observation demands comes not only of the lapse of time but of

the maturity and inner poise that the narrator has achieved at the time he is writing. Because

he has out-grown his past errors he can speak about them. First and foremost, Pip's humorous

self-portrait evinces his belated self-knowledge. He was ridiculous because of his illusions

and comparative self-ignorance (6-7).

Plot summary

On Christmas Eve, around 1812,[13] Pip, an orphan who is approximately six years old, encounters an

escaped convict in the village churchyard while visiting the graves of his mother and father, as well as

those of his siblings. The convict scares Pip into stealing food for him, and a file to grind away his

shackles, from the home he shares with his abusive older sister and her kind, passive husband Joe

Gargery, a blacksmith. The next day, soldiers recapture the convict, and another, while they are engaged

in a fight; the two are returned to the prison ships whence they escaped.

Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster, who wears an old wedding dress and lives in the dilapidated Satis

House, asks Pip's "Uncle Pumblechook" (who is actually Joe's uncle) to find a boy to play with her

adopted daughter Estella. Pip begins to visit Miss Havisham and Estella, with whom he falls in love, with

Miss Havisham's encouragement. Pip visits Miss Havisham multiple times, and during one of these visits,

he brings Joe along. During their absence, Mrs. Joe is attacked by a mysterious individual and lives out

the rest of her life as a mute invalid.

Later, as a young apprentice at Joe Gargery's blacksmith shop, Pip is approached by a lawyer, Mr.

Jaggers, who tells him he is to receive a large sum of money from an anonymous benefactor and must

leave for London immediately where he is to become a gentleman. Concluding that Miss Havisham is his

benefactress, he visits her and Estella, who has returned from studying on the Continent.

Years later, Pip has reached adulthood and is now heavily in debt. His benefactor is revealed to be Abel

Magwitch, the convict he helped, who was transported to New South Wales where he eventually became

wealthy. There is a warrant for Magwitch's arrest in England and he will be hanged if he is caught. A plan

is therefore hatched for him to flee by boat. It is also revealed that Estella is the daughter of Magwitch

and Mr. Jaggers's housemaid, Molly, whom Jaggers defended in a murder charge and who gave up her

daughter to be adopted by Miss Havisham.

Pip confronts Miss Havisham with Estella's history. Miss Havisham stands too close to the fire which

ignites her dress. Pip is burned while saving her, but she eventually dies from her injuries, lamenting hermanipulation of Estella and Pip.

A few days before the escape, Pip is attacked by Joe's journeyman, Orlick, who was responsible for the

attack on Mrs. Joe. Pip is saved, and prepares for the escape. During the escape, Magwitch kills his

enemy Compeyson. Magwitch is captured and sent to jail, where he dies shortly before his

execution,While being told Estella is alive. Barely alive, Magwitch responds with a squeezing of Pip's

palm. Pip is about to be arrested for unpaid debts when he falls ill. Joe nurses him back to health and

pays off his debts.

At the end of the original version Pip meets Estella on the streets; she has remarried after her abusive

husband has died. Pip says that he is glad she is a better girl from what she was before, the coldhearted

girl Miss Havisham reared her to be and that "suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching

and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be." Pip remains single.[14]

Revised endingFollowing comments by Edward Bulwer-Lytton that the ending was too sad, Dickens rewrote the ending

so that Pip now meets Estella in the ruins of Satis House after the death of her husband; there is a

suggestion that they will marry. John Forster and several early 20th-century writers, including George

Bernard Shaw and George Orwell, felt that the original ending was "more consistent with the draft, as

well as the natural working out of the tale"[this quote needs a citation]; modern literary criticism is split over the

matter.

Development history

As Dickens began writingGreat Expectations, he undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative

reading tours. He had separated from his wife, Catherine Dickens, and was keeping secret an affair with

a much younger woman, Ellen Ternan. However, the genesis ofGreat Expectations is not glorious,

artistically, and the idea of romance and economic circumstances dictated the novel's design and

implementation.

Beginning

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In his Book of Memoranda, begun in 1855, Dickens wrote names for possible characters: Magwitch,

Provis, Clarriker, Compey, Pumblechook, Horlick, Gargery, Wopsle, Skiffins, some of which become

familiar in Great Expectations. There is also a reference to a "knowing man," a possible sketch of the

future Bentley Drummle.[8] Another evokes a house full of "Toadies and Humbugs," forshadowing the

visitors to Satis House in Chapter 11.[9][8] In addition, Margaret Cardwell speculates the "premonition"

ofGreat Expectations from a 25 novembre 1855 letter from Dickens to W. H. Wills, in which Dickens

speaks of recycling an "odd idea" for the Christmas special "A House to Let" and "the pivot round which

my next book shall revolve."[10][11] The "odd idea" concerns an individual who "retires to an old lonelyhouseresolved to shut out the world and hold no communion with it."[10]

In a 8 August 1860 letter to Earl Carlisle, Dickens reported his agitation that arrives whenever he

prepares a new book.[8] A month later, in a letter to Forster, Dickens announced that he just had a new

idea.[12]