Dickens reworks his own childhood once again as a first-person narrative in Great Expectations, his thirteenth novel but

only his second use of this highly subjective narrative point-of-view the first being David Copperfield (1849-50), which encorporates the autobiographical fragment that Dickens never published. Unlike his earlier picaresque young heroes such as Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit, Pip (more properly, Philip Pirrip) and David are fully-developed, 'round' characters. Just as a child would, Dickens divides his settings and characters in both novels into the categories of secure" and threatening." But Dickens continues to prize distinctiveness in the drawing of the supporting characters. Uniqueness of identity in both major and minor characters makes the relatively 'flat' hero and heroine seem normal by comparison to such odd ducks as Orlick and Wemmick. As in the earlier, looser works such as The Pickwick Papers (1837) Dickens uses natural dialogue to reveal character subtly and indirectly. Critics such as biographer Fred Kaplan have repeatedly pointed out that Pip and David are portraits of the novelist as a young man, something that the similarity in the initials of the novelist hero of the 1851 novel suggest. The futile love affair with Estella bright, and distant, and cold as the stars for which he has named her reflects young Dickens' own hopeless infatuation with a banker's daughter, Maria Beadnell. Significantly, in the original ending Dickens did not reward Pip for his struggles by arranging the traditional happy ending for the lovers. In his novels Dickens sees the chief problem in life as being people's failing to understand one another clearly, to see the emotional and spiritual reality beneath the surface. This problem is reflected in such matters as the harshness of employers, the disinterestedness of government, the biases of the penal and justice systems--in short, the sheer inhumanity of British social institutions. What is a gentleman, what is true gentility?" are the questions Dickens poses his reader in Great Expectations . He shows the development of Pip from an innocent, unsophisticated orphan to a pseudo- aristocrat and snob tinged by the taint of the prison house. The desire of the animalistic and brutal Orlick for personal vengeance reflects what Dickens sees as the fearful revolutionary potentialities of the masses so well exemplified by that tigress Madame Defarge in his previous novel in All the Year Round, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Estella, cold and distant as the stars that hold the mysteries of our fates, makes Pip painfully aware of his humble condition and motivates him to strive to be something better, worthier of her love (which she can never bestow). Perhaps both learn their socialclimbing at Satis House, and then demonstrate that they have unlearned those childhood lessons in the final scene there, in the revised ending that novelist Sir Edward G. D. BulwerLytton and Dickens's mistress, Ellen Ternan (perhaps a model for Estella) preferred. Wholesale trade was finally considered genteel in the second half of the nineteenth century--as is the case with the proud, haughty Miss Havisham, a brewery heiress who fancies herself an aristocrat. Pip begins with iron chains at Joe's forge but yearns for golden chains, those which also bind Miss Havisham to her past and her thirst for vengeance. At the close of Ch. 19 Pip changes clothes (an act symbolic of his changing class) and leaves his true friends, Biddy and Joe, for the vain and superficial society of London. Like Martin Chuzzlewit in the 1843 picaresque novel, Pip leaves the unspoiled countryside for a city of filth, crime, and oppression. However, Pip becomes a gentleman only in the true sense when he learns from the mouth of his benefactor the actual source of his great expectations; he proves his fundamental humanity by deciding to assist Magwitch, his great-hearted fairy- godfather who is to Pip what Miss Havisham is to Estella. Abel Magwitch, victim of the aristocratic and

depraved Compeyson (Cain?), is Dickens' s indictment of nineteenth-century British society's callous disregard for the welfare of the lower orders. From him Pip unlearns the lessons of Miss Havisham, Jaggers, and Wemmick; once again he values people for what they are rather than for their 'portable property' and pocketbooks. The central plot-- with its secrets that Magwitch is responsible for Pip's fortune and that he is Estella's father--is obscured by surprisingly few digressions; the book's action is tight and well-knit, owing in part perhaps to its weekly as opposed to Dickens's usual monthly serial structure. Like its weekly-serialised brethren,Hard Times (1854) and A Tale of _____. (1859), the 1861 novel has fewer characters and little subplotting. Expectations and exploitation are its organizing and unifying motiffs. And, like its weekly-serialised brethren, Great Expectations lacks both the exuberance and melodrama of Dickens' s earlier, picaresque works. Rigorously maintaining the firstperson point-of-view (rather than his avuncular, Fieldingesque point of view of so evident in earlier works such as Martin Chuzzlewit), Dickens deftly suggests a small boy's perspective in the childhood section by limiting himself strictly to what a child would see and feel. The opening is especially effective in this regard, as the convict turns both Pip and his small world of marshes and dykes upside-down.The scene between the two fellow- victims (Magwitch, a victim of legal and social injustice, an escapee from the hulks; Pip, an orphan only temporarily free of the dictatorship of his sister when he visits his parents' grave) is sensational and dramatic because of the strongly-sensed undercurrent of violence and menace below the humorous, initially- tranquil surface. Magwitch presents Pip with a moral and physical dilemma. Joe, Mrs. Joe, and Biddy present him with a choice of adult characters to emulate. Uncle (in effect, step-father) Joe and Mrs. Joe's Uncle Pumblechook, artisan and merchant, present Pip with value choices. Joe is animated by the doctrine of love, Miss Havisham by that of hate. Matthew and Herbert Pocket repeat the selfless kindness and companionship of Biddy and Joe. These characters constitute Pip's social environment: we note that, although an orphan, Pip has no shortage of step-fathers and step- mothers. Through them Pip must learn how to achieve human happiness. Through them Dickens shows how from infancy the individual is oppressed, moulded, and channelled into his adult identity: The Child is father of the Man" (Wordsworth). Satis House and London are a complementary microcosm and macrocosm. Dickens's symbols generally and of the world-asprison metaphor in particular involve mud, dust, gardens, seeds, the courts, and the river. He contrasts the purity of the Thames in the marsh country, at its mouth, with its pollution and corruption in the metropolis. Dickens' s ability to build suspense through adapting the devices of the late eighteenth-century's Gothic novel (the eerie setting, the child or young woman in danger, the evil and deformed monster, the plausive and villainous aristocrat, the nightmare, and so on) has served as a model for later novelists. Dickens uses the persecution and exploitation of children and the theatricality of funerals to build pathos. However, Dickens is best remembered, perhaps, for his ability to create humour out of farce, nonsense, lampoon, slapstick, and satire, using such stock types as the drunk, the eccentric, the ham actor, the buffoon, the paltroon, the hypocrite, the mercenary physician and his accomplice, the undertaker, and such subjects as education, child abuse and neglect, and keeping up with the Joneses. In On Some Aspects of the Comic in Great Expectations ( Victorian Newsletter 42, Fall 1972) Henri Talon proposes that the style of humour in this novel differs from that of Dickens's earlier works in that here humour is an aspect of the firstperson perspective:

The detachment that comic observation demands comes not only of the lapse of time but of the maturity and inner poise that the narrator has achieved at the time he is writing. Because he has out-grown his past errors he can speak about them. First and foremost, Pip's humorous self-portrait evinces his belated self-knowledge. He was ridiculous because of his illusions and comparative self-ignorance (6-7).
Plot summary
On Christmas Eve, around 1812,[13] Pip, an orphan who is approximately six years old, encounters an escaped convict in the village churchyard while visiting the graves of his mother and father, as well as those of his siblings. The convict scares Pip into stealing food for him, and a file to grind away his shackles, from the home he shares with his abusive older sister and her kind, passive husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. The next day, soldiers recapture the convict, and another, while they are engaged in a fight; the two are returned to the prison ships whence they escaped. Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster, who wears an old wedding dress and lives in the dilapidated Satis House, asks Pip's "Uncle Pumblechook" (who is actually Joe's uncle) to find a boy to play with her adopted daughter Estella. Pip begins to visit Miss Havisham and Estella, with whom he falls in love, with Miss Havisham's encouragement. Pip visits Miss Havisham multiple times, and during one of these visits, he brings Joe along. During their absence, Mrs. Joe is attacked by a mysterious individual and lives out the rest of her life as a mute invalid. Later, as a young apprentice at Joe Gargery's blacksmith shop, Pip is approached by a lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, who tells him he is to receive a large sum of money from an anonymous benefactor and must leave for London immediately where he is to become a gentleman. Concluding that Miss Havisham is his benefactress, he visits her and Estella, who has returned from studying on the Continent. Years later, Pip has reached adulthood and is now heavily in debt. His benefactor is revealed to be Abel Magwitch, the convict he helped, who was transported to New South Wales where he eventually became wealthy. There is a warrant for Magwitch's arrest in England and he will be hanged if he is caught. A plan is therefore hatched for him to flee by boat. It is also revealed that Estella is the daughter of Magwitch and Mr. Jaggers's housemaid, Molly, whom Jaggers defended in a murder charge and who gave up her daughter to be adopted by Miss Havisham. Pip confronts Miss Havisham with Estella's history. Miss Havisham stands too close to the fire which ignites her dress. Pip is burned while saving her, but she eventually dies from her injuries, lamenting her manipulation of Estella and Pip. A few days before the escape, Pip is attacked by Joe's journeyman, Orlick, who was responsible for the attack on Mrs. Joe. Pip is saved, and prepares for the escape. During the escape, Magwitch kills his enemy Compeyson. Magwitch is captured and sent to jail, where he dies shortly before his execution,While being told Estella is alive. Barely alive, Magwitch responds with a squeezing of Pip's palm. Pip is about to be arrested for unpaid debts when he falls ill. Joe nurses him back to health and pays off his debts. At the end of the original version Pip meets Estella on the streets; she has remarried after her abusive husband has died. Pip says that he is glad she is a better girl from what she was before, the coldhearted girl Miss Havisham reared her to be and that "suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be." Pip remains single.[14] Revised ending Following comments by Edward Bulwer-Lytton that the ending was too sad, Dickens rewrote the ending so that Pip now meets Estella in the ruins of Satis House after the death of her husband; there is a suggestion that they will marry. John Forster and several early 20th-century writers, including George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell, felt that the original ending was "more consistent with the draft, as well as the natural working out of the tale"[this quote needs a citation]; modern literary criticism is split over the matter.

Development history
As Dickens began writing Great Expectations, he undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours. He had separated from his wife, Catherine Dickens, and was keeping secret an affair with a much younger woman, Ellen Ternan. However, the genesis of Great Expectations is not glorious, artistically, and the idea of romance and economic circumstances dictated the novel's design and implementation. Beginning

In his Book of Memoranda, begun in 1855, Dickens wrote names for possible characters: Magwitch, Provis, Clarriker, Compey, Pumblechook, Horlick, Gargery, Wopsle, Skiffins, some of which become familiar in Great Expectations. There is also a reference to a "knowing man," a possible sketch of the future Bentley Drummle.[8] Another evokes a house full of "Toadies and Humbugs," forshadowing the visitors to Satis House in Chapter 11.[9][8] In addition, Margaret Cardwell speculates the "premonition" of Great Expectations from a 25 novembre 1855 letter from Dickens to W. H. Wills, in which Dickens speaks of recycling an "odd idea" for the Christmas special "A House to Let" and "the pivot round which my next book shall revolve."[10][11] The "odd idea" concerns an individual who "retires to an old lonely houseresolved to shut out the world and hold no communion with it."[10] In a 8 August 1860 letter to Earl Carlisle, Dickens reported his agitation that arrives whenever he prepares a new book.[8] A month later, in a letter to Forster, Dickens announced that he just had a new idea.[12]