Many of the events from Dickens's early life are mirrored in Great Expectations, which, apart from , is his most autobiographical novel. , the novel's protagonist, lives in the marsh country, works at a job he hates, considers himself too good for his surroundings, and experiences material success in London at a very early age, exactly as Dickens himself did. In addition, one of the novel's most appealing characters, , is a law clerk, and the law, justice, and the courts are all important components of the story.
Great Expectations is set in early Victorian England, a time when great social changes were sweeping the nation. The Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had transformed the social landscape, enabling capitalists and manufacturers to amass huge fortunes. Although social class was no longer entirely dependent on the circumstances of one's birth, the divisions between rich and poor remained nearly as wide as ever. London, a teeming mass of humanity, lit by gas lamps at night and darkened by black clouds from smokestacks during the day, formed a sharp contrast with the nation's sparsely populated rural areas. More and more people moved from the country to the city in search of greater economic opportunity. Throughout England, the manners of the upper class were very strict and conservative: gentlemen and ladies were expected to have thorough classical educations and to behave appropriately in innumerable social situations.
These conditions defined Dickens's time, and they make themselves felt in almost every facet of Great Expectations. Pip's sudden rise from country laborer to city gentleman forces him to move from one social extreme to another while dealing with the strict rules and expectations that governed Victorian England. Ironically, this novel about the desire for wealth and social advancement was written partially out of economic necessity. Dickens's magazine, All the Year Round, had become extremely popular based on the success of works it had published in serial, such as his own and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. But it had experienced a decline in popularity after publishing a dull serial by Charles Lever called A Day's Ride. Dickens conceived of Great Expectations as a means of restoring his publication's fortunes. The book is still immensely popular a century and a half later.
In form, Great Expectations fits a pattern popular in nineteenth-century European fiction: the bildungsroman, or novel depicting growth and personal development, generally a transition from boyhood to manhood such as that experienced by Pip. The genre was popularized by Goethe with his book Wilhelm Meister (1794–1796) and became prevalent in England with such books as Daniel Defoe's , Charlotte Brontë's , and Dickens's own David Copperfield. Each of these works, like Great Expectations, depicts a process of maturation and self-discovery through experience as a protagonist moves from childhood to adulthood.
