Great Expectations

	Charles Dickens timeline	Synopsis and commentary	Themes and significant ideas
	Charles Dickens biography	The context of Great Expectations	What makes a good Great Expectations exam answer?

The popularity of Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812-70) is probably the most popular and best-known of English novelists. He was enormously successful in his own time, and his novels, first issued as serials and then in volume form, were read by millions of people all over the world. He made triumphant tours of the United States, in his later years appearing in England and America as a dramatic and compelling reader of his own work on the public stage. When he died at the comparatively early age of 58, the reading public felt that they had lost a friend, a man who spoke directly to the full range of English society.

His popularity continued after his death. Although there were times when he was ignored in the academic world, he always had faithful readers:

• Many of whom organised themselves into Dickens societies with branches world-wide
• Characters like Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Mr. Micawber, Fagin, Oliver Twist, Mrs Gamp, Scrooge and Mr. Pecksniff have acquired a life beyond the novels in which they appear
• ‘Dickensian’ has become a word in the dictionary, denoting a range of ideas from the comic character, to the jolly Christmas, to something darker and more sinister
• His books have been frequently adapted for film and television and he continues to exert an influence on novelists in this country and elsewhere.

Great Expectations

Among his novels, Great Expectations has always been a particular favourite, among both children and adult readers. Its story, with its hero growing from childhood to manhood, has a very fundamental storytelling appeal, while its range of characters and settings, its element of mystery and even adventure towards the end, make it compelling reading.

It may be that you have assumptions (or prejudices!) about Dickens and his novels.

Now start reading the novel and find out whether it fits these expectations!

About this guide

The aim of this guide is to enhance and support your reading; that is to say that it hopes to increase your enjoyment of the novel and to extend your knowledge and understanding of its content, the context in which it was conceived, written and published, and the ways in which it may be interpreted.

These aims aren’t always easy to separate, so you will find that the guide offers you many opportunities to move between its various sections as you pursue a particular reference or theme. Literary texts aren’t like Frankenstein’s monster, assembled out of various parts with visible joins: they are organic wholes, so it is important that you should realise that topics such as themes, symbols and structure only fully make sense if they are considered together rather than separately.

Using the guide

Websites aren’t like books, beginning at page 1 and ending on the last page: they are flexible and enable you to move around as you choose. Nonetheless, you may find it helpful to have some guidance on the order in which this guide has been constructed, and how you might find it most helpful to use it.

1. A good place to start would be with the section Author section, which contains information about the author’s life and the circumstances in which the book was written.

2. Then, as you work through the text, you will find it best to refer to the

Synopses section, which offers much more than the title suggests:

• ‘Setting the scene’
  • a summary of the text (which, by the way, is intended as a reminder, and not as a substitute for reading the novel!)
• ‘Going deeper’
  • an explanation of any words, phrases or references you might find difficult or obscure
• ‘Investigate!’
  • various tasks and exercises allowing you to work further on the text on your own behalf
• And throughout, many cross-references to other parts of the guide. 

3. From this section you will have been referred to the other parts of the Context section:

• Social/political context: indicating some of the key issues of the period during which Great Expectations was written and first published; one of the major sections is about the educational background, an important theme in the novel
• Religious/philosophical context: ideas seen in the context of their time, alongside Dickens’ own ideas and beliefs; one of the major sections is about his attitude to childhood, enabling you to set Pip’s experiences in the context of ideas about childhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

4. There are also a number of sections devoted to the literary dimensions of the novel: Narrative, Characterisation, Themes and significant ideas, Imagery and symbolism and Structure. These sections are frequently cross-referenced, both from the Synopses section and between one another.

5. The section on Critical analysis looks at the different ways in which the novel has been read since its publication and especially over the past twenty or thirty years. 

6. The section on Approaching essays and exams offers general advice on how to deal with these means of testing your knowledge and understanding of the novel. There are specimen essays and exam questions and an example of textual analysis.

7. The remaining section, Resources, offers advice on where to go if you want to undertake further reading about the novel and its author, in books, articles and websites. There is also a section listing GreatExpectations on film and television, which includes further tasks and exercises for those who are interested.