Great Expectations
...or within the history of Dickens's artistic output (1834-1870). The thirteenth of his novels, it is one of three relatively short novels designed for weekly magazine serialisation rather than monthly "part" publication, the other two being Hard Times (1854) for Household Words and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the first novel serialised in All the Year Round. It is also his third major work to employ the first-person narrative point of view, the other two being the quasi-autobiographical David Copperfield (1849) and (at least, in part) Bleak House (1852). The modern reader sees this novel as a retrospective, first-person confessional. Alternatively, one may attempt to classify Great Expectations in terms of the various subgenres of the Victorian novel, for, unlike his earlier attempt at pseudo-autobiography, David Copperfield, Great Expectations does not fit so neatly into the German-inspired Bildungsroman (novel of development, or growing up).
Social Satire
To counter the lack of humour in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens set out to provide character comedy, situation comedy, and especially (like W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair) social satire. Dickens makes us laugh at a society that values wealth and class, that condones snobbery and social injustice, that transports felons for relatively minor crimes, and that has allowed a great national institution, the theatre, to deteriorate. Although the utterances and actions of many of the characters make us laugh, each character evokes a different kind or quality of laughter.
The Novel of Crime and Detection
A relatively new form (probably an outgrowth of the Newgate Novel of Ainsworth, Thackeray, and Bulwer-Lytton), the Novel of Crime and Detection (sometimes mislabeled "The Murder Mystery") has influenced the characterization and the plot of Great Expectations. Like many of Wilkie...
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