Great Expectations

GREAT EXPECTATIONS is Charles Dickens' thirteenth novel and his penultimate
completed novel; a bildungsroman which depicts the personal growth and
personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel,
after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel
was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year
Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall
published the novel in three volumes. It is set among marshes in Kent, and in
London, in the early to mid-1800s, and contains some of Dickens' most
memorable scenes, including the opening, 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 colorful cast of characters who have entered popular culture.
Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the
eventual triumph of good over evil. GREAT EXPECTATIONS is popular both with
readers and literary critics, and has been translated into many languages, and
adapted numerous times into various media. Upon its release, the novel
received near universal acclaim. Thomas Carlyle spoke disparagingly of "all
that Pip's nonsense". Later, George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, as "All of
one piece and consistently truthful." During the serial publication, Dickens
was pleased with public response to GREAT EXPECTATIONS and its sales; when the
plot first formed in his mind, he called it "a very fine, new and grotesque
idea."