The Companion to Great Expectations

About this book

Dickens' 13th novel has remained pre-eminent among readers for good reasons. Great Expectations (published originally as a weekly serial from 1860 to 1861) has an attractive yet flawed first-person narrator. The plot moves forward with compelling momentum, fueled by mystery, romance, and reversals, and graced with an artistry many consider Dickens' most nearly perfect literary achievement. This new reference companion sets out to recover and illuminate the Victorian culture and allusive verbal worlds that inform the novel. How distinctive are the story's temporal and topographical settings? How carefully has Dickens integrated Pip's life story with the embedded histories of a mad, jilted spinster, a beautiful orphan girl, an unscrupulous con man, a fierce yet tender convict and a brilliant criminal lawyer? What relevance does the then of Pip's childhood and the now when he relates the story of his evolution into a gentlemen have to the revised, controversial ending Dickens adopted on the advice of a fellow novelist? David Paroissien draws on a range of 19th-century sources to illuminate the late Georgian and mid-Victorian contexts of Dickens' novel: the brutal punishments that cha…