Great Expectations

Great Expectations was written to save a magazine. Dickens had launched All the Year Round in 1859 and, in the autumn of 1860, watched its circulation fall under a serial by Charles Lever that readers would not follow. He had been planning a short comic piece about a boy and a convict; he turned it instead into a full novel and began publishing it weekly, in his own magazine, on 1 December 1860. The last instalment appeared on 3 August 1861, and Chapman and Hall published the book in three volumes the same year. Weekly serialisation meant short chapters and a plot that had to move; it also meant, Dickens said, that he had to hold himself back from the expansiveness of his monthly novels, and the book is the tighter for it.

It is, after David Copperfield, the only one of his novels told wholly in the first person, and the one in which the device is most completely earned. Pip narrates from the far side of the events, as a man who has learned what he did not know as a boy, and the distance between the two voices — the boy in the marsh churchyard, the man who judges him — is the book’s engine. Readers remember Magwitch rising among the graves and Miss Havisham in her stopped room; they should also notice how much of the novel is about money and what it does to people, and how unusual it is for Dickens to make his hero behave badly to the one person who has loved him without condition.

Dickens wrote an ending in which Pip and Estella meet once, briefly, and part; Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who read the proofs, urged something less bleak, and Dickens substituted the closing page that appears in the published book and in this edition. The original ending survives in his manuscript and is printed in most scholarly editions; it is not part of the text he published, and this edition does not add it.

This edition follows the Gutenberg transcription of the 1861 text, complete and unabridged, typeset by Bibliomancer; the chapter numbering is continuous, as Dickens published it, rather than divided into the three “stages” of the volume edition.