30 Facts About Great Expectations

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel.

Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture.

Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.

Great Expectations's was jilted at the altar and still wears her old wedding dress and lives in dilapidated Satis House.

Great Expectations is disquieted to see Orlick now in service to Miss Havisham.

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Great Expectations has become wealthy after gaining his freedom there, but cannot return to England on pain of death.

Great Expectations's admits to doing so, but says that her plan was to annoy her relatives.

Great Expectations's gives Pip money to pay for Herbert Pocket's position at Clarriker's, and asks for his forgiveness.

Great Expectations's eventually dies from her injuries, lamenting her manipulation of Estella and Pip.

Great Expectations planned to write "a little piece", a "grotesque tragi-comic conception", about a young hero who befriends an escaped convict, who then makes a fortune in Australia and anonymously bequeaths his property to the hero.

Great Expectations did not even use the Number Plans or Mems; he had only a few notes on the characters' ages, the tide ranges for chapter 54, and the draft of an ending.

On 11 June 1861, Dickens wrote to Macready that Great Expectations had been completed and on 15 June, asked the editor to prepare the novel for publication.

George Gissing called that revision "a strange thing, indeed, to befall Dickens" and felt that Great Expectations would have been perfect had Dickens not altered the ending in deference to Bulwer-Lytton.

George Orwell wrote, "Psychologically the latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did, " but, like John Forster and several early 20th century writers, including George Bernard Shaw, felt that the original ending was more consistent with the draft, as well as the natural working out of the tale.

Great Expectations quarrelled with Bradbury and Evans, who had published his novels for fifteen years.

Great Expectations stopped publishing the weekly Household Words at the summit of its popularity and replaced it with All the Year Round.

Beyond its biographical and literary aspects, Great Expectations appears, according to Robin Gilmour, as "a representative fable of the age".

Narrative structure of Great Expectations is influenced by the fact that it was first published as weekly episodes in a periodical.

The narrative structure of Great Expectations has two main elements: firstly that of "foster parents", Miss Havisham, Magwitch, and Joe, and secondly that of "young people", Estella, Pip and Biddy.

Great Expectations has an unhappy ending, since most characters suffer physically, psychologically or both, or die—often violently—while suffering.

Great Expectations contains a variety of literary genres, including the bildungsroman, gothic novel, crime novel, as well as comedy, melodrama and satire; and it belongs—like Wuthering Heights and the novels of Walter Scott—to the romance rather than realist tradition of the novel.

Complex and multifaceted, Great Expectations is a Victorian bildungsroman, or initiatory tale, which focuses on a protagonist who matures over the course of the novel.

Great Expectations describes Pip's initial frustration upon leaving home, followed by a long and difficult period that is punctuated with conflicts between his desires and the values of established order.

Great Expectations contains many comic scenes and eccentric personalities, integral parts to both the plot and the theme.

Great Expectations contains elements of the Gothic genre, especially Miss Havisham, the bride frozen in time, and the ruined Satis House filled with weeds and spiders.

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Title's "Great Expectations" refers to "a legacy to come", and thus immediately announces that money, or more specifically wealth plays an important part in the novel.

Great Expectations's remains in a constant business relationship with her lawyer Jaggers and keeps a tight grip over her "court" of sycophants, so that, far from representing social exclusion, she is the very image of a powerful landed aristocracy that is frozen in the past and "embalmed in its own pride".

Great Expectations grows selfless and his "expectations" are confiscated by the Crown.

Said's interpretation suggests that Dickens's attitude backs Britain's exploitation of Middle East "through trade and travel", and that Great Expectations affirms the idea of keeping the Empire and its peoples in their place—at the exploitable margins of British society.

However, the novel's Gothic, and Romance genre elements, challenge Said's assumption that Great Expectations is a realist novel like Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.