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Great Expectations Charles Dickens

Contents Context Take a Study Break!

Context Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, and spent the first Is your No
going to s
Plot Overview nine years of his life living in the coastal regions of Kent, a county in
Probs—b
Character List southeast England. Dickens’s father, John, was a kind and likable
should re
man, but he was incompetent with money and piled up tremendous horoscop
Analysis of Major
Characters debts throughout his life. When Dickens was nine, his family moved
Pip to London. When he was twelve, his father was arrested and taken to What you
Estella debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother moved his seven brothers and these fam
literary qu
Miss Havisham sisters into prison with their father, but she arranged for the young
meant vs
Charles to live alone outside the prison and work with other children
ACTUALLY
Themes, Motifs & Symbols pasting labels on bo les in a blacking warehouse (blacking was a
type of manufactured soot used to make a black pigment for QUIZ: How
Summary & Analysis
products such as matches or fertilizer). Dickens found the three dateable w
Chapters 1–3
months he spent apart from his family highly traumatic. Not only was you be in
Chapters 4–7
century?
the job itself miserable, but he considered himself too good for it,
Chapters 8–10
Chapters 11–13
earning the contempt of the other children. Aer his father was
released from prison, Dickens returned to school. He eventually The 25 wo
Chapters 14–16
to start yo
Chapters 17–19 became a law clerk, then a court reporter, and finally a novelist. His
college es
Chapters 20–26 first novel, The Pickwick Papers, became a huge popular success
Chapters 27–35 when Dickens was only twenty-five. He published extensively and
Chapters 36–37 was considered a literary celebrity until his death in 1870. The most
Chapters 38–39 "love at fir
Many of the events from Dickens’s early life are mirrored in Great moments
Chapters 40–46
Chapters 47–52
Expectations, which, apart from David Copperfield, is his most literature

Chapters 53–56 autobiographical novel. Pip, the novel’s protagonist, lives in the
Chapters 57–59 marsh country, works at a job he hates, considers himself too good 12 lingerin
for his surroundings, and experiences material success in London at questions
a very early age, exactly as Dickens himself did. In addition, one of have abou
Important Quotations
Po er
Explained the novel’s most appealing characters, Wemmick, is a law clerk, and
Key Facts the law, justice, and the courts are all important components of the
QUIZ: Wha
Study Questions & Essay story.
Topics the first se
your autob
Quizzes Great Expectations is set in early Victorian England, a time when
be?
Suggestions for Further great social changes were sweeping the nation. The Industrial
Reading
Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had
How to Cite This SparkNote If Holden C
transformed the social landscape, enabling capitalists and could text
manufacturers to amass huge fortunes. Although social class was no
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longer entirely dependent on the circumstances of one’s birth, the
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divisions between rich and poor remained nearly as wide as ever.
London, a teeming mass of humanity, lit by gas lamps at night and Animal Fa
darkened by black clouds from smokestacks during the day, formed told in a s
tweets
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 Buy on BN.com and save!
ladies were expected to have thorough classical educations and to
Great Expectations (Ba
behave appropriately in innumerable social situations. Noble Classics Series)

These conditions defined Dickens’s time, and they make themselves Paperback $7.15

felt in almost every facet of Great Expectations. Pip’s sudden rise $7.95 | Save 10 %

from country laborer to city gentleman forces him to move from one
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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 wri en Great Expectations (Spa
partially out of economic necessity. Dickens’s magazine, All the Year Literature Guide Series)

Round, had become extremely popular based on the success of Paperback $5.06
works it had published in serial, such as his own A Tale of Two Cities $5.95 | Save 14 %
and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. But it had experienced a
decline in popularity aer publishing a dull serial by Charles Lever Shop Now

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 pa ern 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 Robinson Crusoe, Charlo e Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 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.

NEXT:
Plot Overview  

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READERS' NOTES ADD A NOTE   →

Most Helpful Readers' Notes (40 total)

To answer your question..

 by SHOOMATE, September 18, 2012

In the original ending, they did not get together. Estella got
remarried aer Dummle died, and thought Joe and Biddy's
son was Pip's son, and Pip didn't correct her. In the second
and final ending, Estella and Pip reunite in the garden, and it
says "there was no shadow of another parting from her",
basically meaning they got together. It doesn't tell the reader
100% that they got married or anything, but it is highly likely
they did in this ending.

0 Comments 46 out of 65 people found this helpful

great expectations
by NTHUTENG, September 25, 2012

so what is the significance of Newgate for Pip's development

from childhood to the end of the novel? and how does the
narrator uses manners to comment on moral awareness

0 Comments 25 out of 62 people found this helpful

Ending of Great Expectations

by TYLER_SPILLERS, October 17, 2012

Dont forget Charles Dickens never got to finish the book. He

died before he was even close to finishing.

2 Comments 1 out of 20 people found this helpful

SEE ALL 40 READERS' NOTES   →

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