Dickens first thought of setting a novel in the time of the French Revolution when he read Thomas Carlyle's book The French Revolution, which was first published in 1839. He read this book faithfully every year, but used it sparingly in researching his novels. Dickens finally came up with a way to use it in 1857, when he acted in Wilkie Collins' play, The Frozen Deep. Dickens played a self-sacrificing lover in the play; this role inspired him so much that he wanted to use it in his own novels. He eventually decided to place his own sacrificing lover in the revolutionary period, a period of great social upheaval. A year later, Dickens went through his own form of social change as he wrote the novel; he separated from his wife, and revitalized his career by making plans for a new weekly literary journal called All the Year Round. In 1859, A Tale of Two Cities premiered in parts in this journal. It was popular, not only from the fame of its author, but also for its short length and radical (for Dickens) subject matter.
Dickens' health started deteriorating in the 1860s. The fact that he had started doing public readings of his works in 1858 exacted even greater a physical toll on him. On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died and was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Though The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished at the time of his death, he had written fifteen substantial novels and countless shorter pieces by then. His legacy is clear. While he pointed out problems within societyÐa blinding and mercenary greed for money, neglect of all sectors in society, and a wrong inequality, he offered us, at the same time, a solution. Through his books, we come to understand the virtues of a loving heart and the pleasures of home in a flawed, cruelly indifferent world. In the end, the lesson to take away from his stories is a positive one. Alternately insightful and whimsical, Dickens' writings have shown readers over generations the reward of being truly human.
When Dickens started his thirteenth novel , Great Expectations, in 1860, he was already a national hero. He had come from humble beginnings, working as a child in a shoe polish factory while his family was in debtor's prison, to become the quintessential Victorian gentleman. He was involved in all aspects of English life: writing, acting, producing, going on book tours, publishing magazines, and, as always, active in social welfare and criticism.
Amidst all this, however, Dickens' private life had entered a dark period. Dickens had just separated from his wife two years earlier, there were rumors of an affair with a young actress in the newspapers, and he was spending more and more time at his home in Chatham.
Dickens himself had risen to achieve greater expectations than any clerk's boy could expect, but he had not found happiness. The idea that one must search beyond material wealth and social standings and look within themselves for happiness becomes the major theme in Great Expectations.
Some time in 1860, Dickens had started a piece that he found funny and truthful and thought it might do better as a novel: "...it so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner," he wrote. Dickens had told friends that he had gone back and read David Copperfield and was quite struck by the story now that he looked back upon it. Copperfield was a happy novel, the story of a young man who came into his fortune though hard work and luck. Its influences and similarities are seen in Great Expectations. There are, however, some major thematic differences.
Though not considered as autobiographical as David Copperfield which he had published some ten years earlier, the character of Pip represented a Dickens who had learned some hard lessons in his later life. Especially strong throughout the novel are the concepts of fraternal and romantic love, how society thwarts them, how a man should find them.
For financial reasons, Dickens had to shorten the novel, making it one of his tighter and better written stories. It was published in serial form, as were all of his novels, and the reader can still see the rhythm of suspense and resolution every couple of chapters that kept all of England waiting for the next issue.
Though a dark novel, Great Expectations was deliberately more humorous than its predecessor A Tale of Two Cities, and even while it presented Dickens' ever present social critique, it did so in a way that made people laugh.
The greatest difference between Great Expectations and Dickens' earlier novels is the introduction of dramatic psychological transformations within the lead characters, as opposed to characters that are changed only through their circumstances and surroundings. The story of Pip is a Bildungsroman -- a story that centers on the education or development of the protagonist -- and we can follow closely the things that Pip learns and then has to unlearn.
All in all, Great Expectations is considered the best balanced of all of Dickens' novels, though a controversy still persists over the ending. Dickens had originally written an ending where Pip and Estella never get back together. Many critics, including George Bernard Shaw, believe that this rather depressing ending was more consistent with the overall theme and tone of the novel, which began, continued, and perhaps should have finished with a serious, unhappy note.
Nevertheless, Dickens published the ending where all is forgiven and Estella and Pip walk out of the Satis House garden together.
It was, perhaps, an ending that Dickens would have like to have had for his own life. Dickens published one more novel, Our Mutual Friend, before dying in 1870.
ClassicNote on Great Expectations
Chapter 1:
The story opens with the narrator, Pip, who introduces himself and describes an image of himself as a boy, standing alone and crying in a churchyard near some marshes. Young Pip is staring at the gravestones of his parents, who died soon after his birth. This tiny, shivering bundle of a boy is suddenly terrified by the voice of large, bedraggled man who threatens to cut Pip's throat if he doesn't stop crying.
The man, dressed in a prison uniform with a great iron shackle around his leg, grabs the boy and shakes him upside down, emptying his pockets. The man devours a piece of bread which falls from the boy, then barks questions at him. Pip tells him that yes, he is an orphan and that he lives with his sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, the wife of a blacksmith, about a mile from the church. The man tells Pip that if he wants to live, he'll go down to his house and bring him back some food and a file for the shackle on his leg. Pip agrees to meet him early the next morning and the man walks back into the marshes.
Analysis:
Dickens introduces us immediately to Pip, who serves as both the young protagonist of Great Expectations and the story's narrator looking back on his own story as an adult. With this two-level approach, Dickens leads the reader through young Pip's life with the immediacy and surprise of a first person narration while at the same time guiding with an omnipotent narrator who knows how it will all turn out. The adult narrator Pip will foreshadow future events throughout the story by using signs and symbols.
Dickens uses this duality to great effect in the first chapter, where we are personally introduced to Pip as if we were in a pleasant conversation with him: "I give Pirrip as my father's family name..." Immediately after this, however, we are thrown into the point of view of a terrified young child being mauled by an escaped convict.
The narrator Pip then presents an interesting, and prophetic, relationship between the boy and the bullying man. At first, the relationship appears to be based solely on power and fear. The man yells at the boy only to get what he wants, a file and some food, and the boy only responds for fear of his life. And yet, after they part, the young Pip keeps looking back at the man as he walks alone into the marshes. The image of the man holding his arms around him, alone on the horizon save a pole associated with the death of criminals, is strikingly familiar to the initial image of young Pip, holding himself in the cold, alone in the churchyard with the stones of his dead parents. For a moment, then, the relationship seems to warm. They share a common loneliness and a common marginalization from society, the orphan and the escaped convict. Even while he is afraid, Pip instinctively displays a sympathetic reaction.
This initial meeting, between a small boy and a convict, will develop into the central relationship in the book. It is the relationship which will cause Pip's great expectations for himself to rise and fall.
