In mid-September 1860, Charles Dickens wrote to his longtime friend and future biographer, John Forster, that he had conceived of “a very fine, new, and grotesque idea” for a story. “It so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner,” he continued (Letters 310). The inspiration came at a critical moment, for sales of Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round had begun to plummet as readers lost interest in its current serial—Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride. “[T]here is no vitality in it,” Dickens commented of Lever’s effort, “and no chance whatever of stopping the fall; which on the contrary would be certain to increase” (Letters 320). Hastening to prevent a further drop in sales, Dickens wrought his “grotesque, tragi-comic conception” (Letters 325) into his third to last novel, Great Expectations. Tapping into his own childhood and youth for inspiration—as he had done with David Copperfield some ten years earlier—Dickens dashed off the first eight chapters of his new novel within a month’s time (Rosenberg 397). On December 1, 1860, the novel’s first installment was published in All the Year Round, and the journal’s readership quickly rose back to 100,000, where it had stood for Dickens’s first contribution, A Tale of Two Cities (Paroissien 1). We might measure this statistic against the sales numbers of other mid-century periodicals: Dickens’s first journal, Household Words (1850-1859), averaged a readership of 40,000 in its best years, as did Punch, a weekly satirical magazine, in 1854; the Cornhill Magazine, another weekly miscellany begun in 1860, averaged 84,000 in its first two years; Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and Boy’s Own Magazine averaged 60,000 and 40,000 respectively in 1862 (Altick 395). Enthusiasm for Great Expectations did not diminish when it was published in three-volume book form on July 6, 1861, and it ran through five editions in the same number of months (Rosenberg 398). A century and a half later, Great Expectations remains one of the most widely taught of Dickens’s works and is without doubt the most canonical of the novels to have been published originally in All the Year Round, which also ushered into the world Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859-1860) and Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863). Between Dickens’s time and our own, attitudes toward Great Expectations have ranged from lavish praise to skepticism and dismissal as the novel provided a platform for debates over such issues as the nature and value of Dickens’s realism, Dickens’s political stance, the relevance and effects of his traumatic childhood on his fiction, and his attitude toward women. Indeed, a review of the novel’s critical reception offers ample testimony to the pronouncement of early 20th-century critic and literary historian George Saintsbury that “no author in our literary history has been both admired and enjoyed for such different reasons; by such different tastes and intellects; by whole classes of readers unlike each other” (Saintsbury 256).

Publishing serial novels in periodicals became common practice for authors in the mid to late nineteenth century. Rising literacy rates and increased leisure time along with the repeals of the newspaper stamp tax (1855) and paper duty (1861) (known as “taxes on knowledge”) made this form of publication lucrative and expedient for authors, publishers, and printers while providing the public with a relatively cheap form of entertainment that could be enjoyed in short spurts of time. In 1858, the sensation novelist and Dickens’s close friend Wilkie Collins estimated the total readership of periodical fiction in England at three million (Altick 357). By 1864, records show that journals containing novels were the most popular of all weekly periodicals, averaging a million and a half copies sold per month (Altick 358). Writing for serial publication posed considerable challenges for novelists, who had to adhere to tight deadlines, conceive of their novels in segments aimed at maintaining readers’ interest between installments, settle for little or no revision time, and face criticism for a novel before its completion. Some critics regarded these challenges as ultimately beneficial for the craft of fiction. Reviewing Great Expectations in 1861, the Times commented that serial publication—of which it acknowledged Dickens as a founding father—was initiating a positive change in novel writing. “The periodical publication of the novel … has forced English writers to develop a plot and work up the incidents. Lingering over the delineation of character and of manners, our novelists began to lose sight of the story and to avoid action. Periodical publication compelled them to a different course” (Collins 431). Some novelists resisted this change in course, feeling the challenge of writing for deadlines too difficult, and both George Eliot (aka Marian Evans) and Elizabeth Gaskell declined Dickens’s invitation to contribute to All the Year Round. Their reluctance—and the failure of Charles Lever’s novel—was one catalyst for Great Expectations’s appearance in the journal.

Dickens was well aware of the many drawbacks to serial publication, lamenting in the Postscript to Our Mutual Friend that the reader of the serial cannot “until they have [the novel] before them complete, perceive the relations of its finer threads to the whole pattern which is always before the eyes of the story-weaver at his loom” (Postscript 162). Nevertheless, despite the admitted difficulties of planning a novel in short allotments of space and time, Dickens enjoyed the challenges that serial publication posed. (Indeed, he had little experience writing novels in any other way.) John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson note that one of the attractions of the form for Dickens lay in the intimate relationship formed between storyteller and audience as the novel developed in response to its readers’ reactions. Serial publication, write Butt and Tillotson, “meant a larger public, but also a public more delicately responsive, who made their views known during the progress of a novel both by writing to him and by reducing or increasing their purchases” (16). To maintain this dialogue with his readers, Dickens never got too far ahead of them in his writing. Archibald Coolidge relates in Charles Dickens as Serial Novelist that “Dickens wrote his novels as he published them, in monthly or weekly installments. He rarely completed a monthly number much more than ten days before it was to be printed and considered being four weeks ahead of the printer his customary advance in the weekly serials” (50). The writing of Great Expectations started off with a bang, but ill health seized Dickens shortly after he finished the first month’s installment. In his 1990 biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd attributes the darker aspects of the novel to Dickens’s sickness during composition, but from Dickens’s letters, it is apparent that writing had a restorative effect. “A certain allotment of my time when I have that story-demand upon me, has, all through my Author life, been an essential condition of my health and success,” he confessed in a letter on Dec. 4, 1860. “I have just returned here [to his home at Gad’s Hill] to work so many hours every day for so many days. It is really impossible for me to break my bond” (Letters 345). It is possible that Dickens’s bond to his writing was particularly important at this time in providing a form of stability to compensate for his separation in 1858 from Catherine, his wife of 22 years.

Reviews immediately following the publication of Great Expectations were concerned primarily with comparing Dickens’s newest novel to his previous works. Many critics welcomed what appeared to be a return to the light-heartedness and humor that had been absent from his last three works. “After passing under the cloud of Little Dorrit and Bleak House… . [Dickens] has written a story that is new, original, powerful and very entertaining,” commented the Saturday Review. “Great Expectations restores Mr Dickens and his readers to the old level. It is in his best vein, … quite worthy to stand beside Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield” (Collins 427). The Atlantic Monthly echoed this sentiment and deemed the plot of Great Expectations to be “the best that Dickens has ever invented” (Collins 428). It further commented on the skill with which Dickens manipulated the serial form, testifying “to the felicity with which expectation was excited and prolonged, and to the series of surprises which accompanied the unfolding of the plot of the story” (Collins 428). The Times similarly welcomed the novel’s lighter tone but did so more cautiously: “Mr Dickens has in the present work given us more of his earlier fancies than we have had for years. Great Expectations is not, indeed, his best work, but it is to be ranked among his happiest. There is that flowing humour in it which disarms criticism and which is all the more enjoyable because it defies criticism” (Collins 431). The Dublin University Magazine, however, felt neither disarmed nor dissuaded from criticism and attributed the humor, which others had praised, to a decline in the aging author. “The favourite of our youth still stands before us, in outline but little changed, the old voice still sounding pleasantly in our ears, the old humour still peeping playfully from lip to eye; but time, flattery, and self-indulgence have robbed his phrases of half their whilom happiness; the old rich humour shines wan and watery through an ever-deepening film of fancies farfetched or utterly absurd; while all the old mannerisms and deformities that once seemed to impart a kind of picturesque quaintness to so many neighbour beauties, have been growing more and more irredeemably ungraceful and pitilessly obtrusive …” (Collins 434-435). The note of disappointment was likewise sounded by Margaret Oliphant in her famous Blackwood’s Magazine article on “Sensational Novels,” which found in Great Expectations all the “strange, dangerous, and exciting” incidents of the new genre but deemed the overall work to be “feeble, fatigued, and colourless” (Collins 439). In Mrs. Oliphant’s view, Dickens was betraying all his “genius and natural power” (442) by stooping to adopt sensational techniques that ultimately failed to create the desired effect on his readers. “Mr Dickens,” concludes Mrs. Oliphant, “is the careless, clever boy who could [write a novel] twice as well as [Mr Wilkie Collins] but won’t take the pains” (Collins 442).

Critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemed largely to concur with Mrs. Oliphant’s view that Dickens had misapplied—or failed to apply—his obvious genius. The very sensationalism and humor that had endeared him to early and mid-Victorian readers became the grounds for dismissal by highbrow, Modernist critics. “Dickens had no university education, and the literary men from Oxford and Cambridge, who have lately been sifting fastidiously so much of the English heritage, have rather snubbingly left him alone,” Edmund Wilson commented in 1965 of Dickens’s decline in the critical eye during the decades immediately following his death. “The Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevsky’s master, Dickens… . [He has been] made into one of those Victorian scarecrows with ludicrous Freudian flaws—so infantile, pretentious, and hypocritical as to deserve only a perfunctory sneer” (3). While the formation of The Dickens Fellowship in 1902 and their founding of The Dickensian in 1905 proved that Dickens still maintained a loyal following of readers, these same years saw heated debates arise among scholars and critics over Dickens’s importance to literary history. Dickens’s caricature, sensationalism, sentimentality, and leavening humor found little support in a critical atmosphere that favored social realism and philosophical sobriety. “Mr Dickens is a great observer and a great humorist, but he is nothing of a philosopher,” Henry James noted in an 1865 review of Our Mutual Friend for The Nation. “[The novelist] must know man as well as men, and to know man is to be a philosopher” (Wall 168). George Eliot’s paramour, George Henry Lewes, praised Dickens’s imagination, genius, and vision in the Fortnightly Review in 1872 but noted that his characters were “merely masks—not characters, but personified characteristics, caricatures and distortions of human nature” (Wall 195). In the eyes of cultivated readers, Lewes continues, Dickens’s “drawing is so vivid yet so incorrect, or else so blurred and formless, with such excess of effort … that the doubt arises how an observer so remarkably keen could make observations so remarkably false, and miss such very obvious facts …” (Wall 198). Lewes’s reflection on Dickens ultimately transpires into a criticism of an unreflective mass readership all too willing to accept Dickens’s unreal, impossible, mechanistic figures for reality. His call for a tightening of critical standards and a clear distinction between literature and popular fiction was certainly answered judging from Dickens’s dismissal by a number of influential critics in later years. Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, wrote Dickens’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography in 1888: “If literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists… . The criticism of more severe critics chiefly consist in the assertion that his merits are such as suit the half-educated” (Stephen 221). Perhaps F. R. Leavis sums up best the reason for Dickens’s critical disfavor in the early twentieth century when he excludes Dickens from The Great Tradition (1948), a text that largely helped to shape the literary canon as we now know it (though he would later amend his stance). “The reason for not including Dickens in the line of great novelists is [that his] genius was that of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no profounder responsibility as a creative artist than this description suggests” (31-32).

Dickens was not, however, without some influential supporters during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and these often cited Great Expectations in their defense of the author’s skill and insight. The novelist George Gissing argued in his 1898 book Charles Dickens: A Critical Study that those who thought Dickens’s characters were types and abstractions rather than real individuals did not know the reality of lower middle-class life in Dickens’s London: “Sixty years ago, grotesques and eccentricities were more common than nowadays; … nowadays he would have to search for them amid the masses drilled unto uniformity, but there they are—the same creatures differently clad” (14-15). Dickens’s subjects, Gissing asserts, lived a different reality than the upper-class, fin-de-siècle critics who dismissed his works as mere fantasy. Of Great Expectations, Gissing writes that “nothing [is] related, as seen or heard, which could not have been seen or heard by the writer” (67). He cites Joe Gargery as an exemplar of realism who “lives in a world, not of melodrama, but of everyday cause and effect” (107). Admitting that Dickens’s imagination did occasionally run away with him, Gissing stresses that the author’s ability to create real characters must not be denied simply because these characters sometimes occupied impossible circumstances: “Pip is so thoroughly alive that we can forget his dim relations with Satis House” (107). A. C. Swinburne also wrote favorably in Dickens’s defense in 1902, citing Great Expectations as one of “the highest landmarks of success ever reared for immortality by the triumphant genius of Dickens” (Swinburne 252). Others, like G. K. Chesterton, writing in 1906, saw in Dickens an influential social reformer and humanitarian and called Gissing to task for failing to acknowledge the hope and optimism of Dickens’s time. Dickens, according to Chesterton, “was the voice in England of this humane intoxication and expansion, this encouraging of anybody to be anything… . His work has the great glory of the Revolution, the bidding of every man to be himself …” (14). For Chesterton, Great Expectations, coming at the end of Dickens’s career, begins to reflect some of the pessimism and loss of hope that colors the later part of the century. However, the novel still remained true to what Chesterton considered to be Dickens’s understanding of “permanent and presiding humanity” (228). According to Chesterton, Pip’s “vacillations … between the humble life to which he owes everything, and the gorgeous life from which he expects something, touch a very true and somewhat tragic part of morals; for the great paradox of morality … is that the very vilest kind of fault is exactly the most easy kind… . Dickens has dealt with this easy descent of desertion, this silent treason, with remarkable accuracy in the account of the indecision of Pip” (233-234). For writers like Gissing and Chesterton, the disconnect between Dickens and his Modernist critics must be attributed not to problems with the former’s realism but with the latter’s inability to appreciate the social milieu of mid-Victorian England and to perceive transcendent human truths.

Many of Dickens’s defenders from the first decades of the twentieth century rested their arguments on the author’s sympathy for and support of the lower and working classes. In 1908, the novelist and critic Edwin Pugh claimed in Charles Dickens: The Apostle of the People that Dickens was a “Socialist without knowing it” (315), and in 1938, Thomas A. Jackson read Dickens through a Marxist lens (as does Raymond Williams later in 1970). According to Jackson, Great Expectations is Dickens’s indictment of modern, Capitalist society. “Self-satisfied, mid-Victorian, British society buoyed itself up with as great ’expectations’ of future wealth and glory as did poor, deluded Pip. If it had but known, its means of ostentation came from a source (the labour of the depressed and exploited masses) to which it would have been as shocked to acknowledge indebtedness as Pip was to find he owed all his acquired gentility to the patronage of the transported felon” (Jackson 197). Magwitch, according to Jackson, represents the monstrous image of the working man created by and looming in the minds of respectable society. But the exposure of Pip’s indebtedness to the convict reveals the reality of respectable society’s dependence on the laboring classes. While later criticism tarnished Dickens’s image as a Revolutionary writer, contemporary critics like Jeremy Tambling and Susan Walsh have used Marxist approaches productively to understand the role of mid-Victorian economic conditions on the novel’s configurations of class and gender.

The 1930’s and 1940’s witnessed a protest to the image of Dickens as a Revolutionary and Socialist. In contrast to earlier scholars who criticized Dickens’s populist appeal, Socialist critics emphasized Dickens’s snobbery and apologist stance toward aristocratic values. George Bernard Shaw’s 1937 foreword to the Edinburgh limited edition of Great Expectations suggested that Pip’s snobbery toward Magwitch must be seen as a reflection of Dickens’s own attitudes toward the lower classes. Shaw notes that Dickens “never raises the question why Pip should refuse Magwitch’s endowment and shrink from him with such inhuman loathing. Magwitch no doubt was a Warmint from the point of view of the genteel Dickens family and even from his own… . I am afraid Pip must be to this extent identified with Dickens—[he] could not see Magwitch as an animal of the same species as himself or Miss Havisham. His feeling is true to the nature of snobbery; but his creator says no word in criticism of that ephemeral limitation” (296). Shaw, erroneously, predicted the novel’s lack of self-awareness in this regard would limit its appeal to later generations “as our social conscience expands and makes the intense class snobbery of the nineteenth century seem less natural to us” (296).

George Orwell expanded on Shaw’s suggestions in his 1940 essay on Dickens. Orwell criticizes Dickens for attacking “the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places… . There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference it if were overthrown” (Orwell 297-8). Far from being a Socialist, Dickens, in Orwell’s estimation, exhibited pro-capitalist sentiments and a reprehensible complacency with his current political situation: “It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure… . A ’change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo” (299). In contrast to critics like Gissing, Orwell suggests that Dickens knew nothing about the lives of the working people he portrayed and for whom he seemed to evoke sympathy. His ignorance is evidenced by the fact that few of his novels show people at work. “Pip, for instance, ’goes into business’ in Egypt: we are not told what business, and Pip’s working life occupies about half a page of the book… . As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance, industry or politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire” (301). Orwell goes on to point out the upper-class pretensions of Dickens’s supposedly working-class characters. “The vivid pictures that he succeeds in leaving in one’s memory are nearly always the pictures of things seen in leisure moments, in the coffee-rooms of country inns or through the windows of a stage-coach” (303). Noting that Dickens has been “stolen” for various causes—Marxism, Catholicism, Conservatism—Orwell doubts Dickens’s appropriateness for any of these social agendas: “The question is, What is there to steal? Why does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens?” (306). The answer, Orwell concludes, is that Dickens has become an institution: “Whether you approve of him or not, he is there, like the Nelson Column” (307). The comment is telling of Dickens’s tenacious hold on the minds and imaginations of a diverse population of readers, despite the attempts of prominent critics to evict him from the literary canon.

Humphry House’s The Dickens World (1941) has often been credited with lifting Dickens back into critical favor. Using Dickens’s works as lenses into Victorian London, House argued that Dickens’s novels could serve as documents recording the events, tempers, and tones of their age with the accuracy and perceptiveness of Dickens’s journalistic eye. In stark contrast to earlier critics who had refuted the reality of Dickens’s portraits, House stated that “many readers who would be bored by the reports of the Poor Law Commissioners or Garratt’s Suggestions for a Reform of the Proceedings in Chancery can look in Oliver Twist and Bleak House for pictures of their times, and contributions to the cure of the evils they describe” (9). House deemed Great Expectations to be “the perfect expression of a phase of English society: it is a statement, to be taken as it stands of what money can do, good and bad; of how it can change and make distinctions of class; how it can pervert virtue, sweeten manners, open up new fields of enjoyment and suspicion. The mood of the book belongs not to the imaginary date of its plot, but to the time in which it was written; for the unquestioned assumptions that Pip can be transformed by money and the minor graces it can buy, and that the loss of one fortune can be repaired on the strength of incidental gains in voice and friends, were only possible in a country secure in its internal economy, with expanding markets abroad: this could hardly be said of England in the ’twenties and ’thirties” (159). House’s idea that Dickens’s novels could be used as journalistic testimonials to his time was taken up by Dickens scholars like Philip Collins and Ivor Brown in the 1960’s, and House’s approach still exerts undeniable influence over current New Historical approaches to the novel.

Emerging almost simultaneously with House’s work, Edmund Wilson’s essay “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” (first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1940) brought Dickens criticism in a very different but equally influential direction. Determining Dickens’s childhood work in the blacking factory to be “a trauma from which he suffered all his life” (7), Wilson introduced a psycho-biographical approach that allowed for more complex interpretations of characters and their motives. For Wilson, “the work of Dickens’ whole career was an attempt to digest [his childhood] shocks and hardships, to explain them to himself, to justify himself in relation to them, to give an intelligible and tolerable picture of a world in which such things could occur” (8-9). This assumption informs his reading of Great Expectations, which, for Wilson, occupies an important transitional moment in Dickens’s opus. In Great Expectations, Wilson claims, Dickens moves out of the melodramatic dualism upon which his earlier works had turned as he tries to combine good and bad qualities in a single character, thereby allowing for more psychological complexity: “In Great Expectations we see Pip pass through a whole psychological cycle. At first, he is sympathetic, then by a more or less natural process he turns into something unsympathetic, then he becomes sympathetic again. Here the effects of both poverty and riches are seen from the inside in one person. This is for Dickens a great advance; and it is a development which, if carried far enough, would end by eliminating the familiar Dickens of the lively but limited stage characters, with their tag lines and their unvarying make-ups” (54). Wilson is recognized as blazing the way for a branch of Dickens criticism that focused, in Lyn Pykett’s words, on the “social construction of the writer’s psyche and in his fictional representations of the complex interdependence of psychological and social organization” (475). Certainly, Wilson’s work has allowed for the application of psychoanalytic apparatus as interpretive tools, as evidenced by the works of Peter Brooks and Michal Peled Ginsburg, both whom borrow Freudian terminology to understand the novel’s structural and thematic issues.

The mid-twentieth century saw both an integration and rejection of previous critical approaches as Dickens settled firmly into the literary canon. Among the two most influential books on Dickens to come out in the 1950’s were Dorothy Van Ghent’s The English Novel: Form and Function (1953) and J. Hillis Miller’s Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958). Both critics focused on the significance of Pip’s isolation from his family and society, but while the former incorporated elements of Wilson’s psychological criticism and Marxist readings, the latter formed itself on an explicit rejection of Wilson’s and House’s approaches. Van Ghent’s analysis of Great Expectations focuses on the soliloquizing quality of characters’ spoken language and the failure of communication that results from their solipsism. Dickens’s world, Van Ghent argues, is one “of isolated integers, terrifyingly alone and unrelated” (Van Ghent, 127). Borrowing from Marxist readings of the novel, she suggests that Great Expectations reflects a world where “people were becoming things, and things (the things that money can buy or that are the means for making money or for exalting prestige in the abstract) were becoming more important than money. People were being de-animated, robbed of their souls, and things were usurping the prerogatives of animate creatures—governing the lives of their owners in the most literal sense” (Van Ghent, 128). Pip, as a child, is treated as a thing (by Magwitch, Mrs. Joe, and Miss Havisham), is surrounded by people who have lost their humanity, and subsequently learns to exploit others as an adult. Pip’s snobbery, Van Ghent asserts, “is a denial of the human value of others” (Van Ghent 136). In contrast to Van Ghent’s interweaving of previous approaches to the novel, J. Hillis Miller, who would later become a leading member of the Yale School of Deconstruction, argued for reading Dickens’s works not as products of the author’s psychological conditions or of his environment but as means of self-apprehension and self-creation. Novels, Miller asserts, must be regarded as “autonomous works of art” that do not act as transparent lenses into the real world but rather transform the real world through the distortive lens of the author’s imagination as he tries to understand the world and find his place in it. Miller regarded Great Expectations as “the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens’ abiding sense of the world” and Pip as “the archetypal Dickens hero” (249) who is separated from nature, orphaned, holds no status in his community, desires possession, and is conscious of deprivation. “At the center of Dickens’s novels is a recognition of the bankruptcy of the relation of the individual to society as it now exists, the objective structure of given institutions and values. Only what an individual makes of himself, in charitable relations to others, counts. And this self-creation tends to require open revolt against the pressures of society. Human beings are themselves the source of the transcendence of their isolation” (254). Thus, while Van Ghent sees Pip’s isolation as an indictment of a dehumanized, mechanized, and tragically fragmented society, Miller views this same isolation as the source of heroic action and self-realization.

In his recent book, The Dickens Industry: Critical Perspectives 1836-2005, Laurence Mazzeno asserts that “by the 1960’s [Dickens] was accorded primacy of place among Victorian novelists both as an artist and a chronicler of society” (119). Erasing doubt about the author’s rightful place in literary history, a number of critical retrospectives appeared, including Ford and Lane’s The Dickens Critics (1961), Gross and Pearson’s Dickens and the Twentieth Century (1962), and Martin Price’s Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays (1967). Published on the centenary of Dickens’s death, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis’s Dickens the Novelist (1970) exemplifies the shift in tone toward Dickens from skepticism to celebration. F. R. Leavis, who had rejected Dickens from the Great Tradition, and his wife, Q. D. Leavis, who had voiced similar dismissal in her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), now claimed in the preface that “Our purpose is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers; that with the intelligence inherent in creative genius, he developed a fully conscious devotion to his art, becoming as a popular and fecund, but yet profound, serious and wonderfully resourceful practicing novelist, a master of it; and that, as such, he demands a critical attention he has not had” (ix). Rejecting the approach of Edmund Wilson and his followers as “wrong-headed, ill-informed … and essentially ignorant and misdirecting” (ix), the Leavises attempted to redeem Dickens’s literary genius by extricating his work from psychoanalytical, Marxist, and “other ideologically-slanted interpretations of Dickens’s achievement” (xiii). Q. D. Leavis’s chapter, “How We Must Read Great Expectations” operates under the assumption that Dickens “worked schematically by translating ideas into characters and their relations to each other, and by choosing or arranging illustrative settings for this …” (289). These ideas, Leavis suggests, allowed Dickens to deduce “a coherent and compelling analysis of what was fundamentally amiss with his society… . [In Great Expectations] it is seen as a society that first makes and then executes criminals, with a quite arbitrary conception of justice, a society in which all are therefore guilty inescapably—there are no innocent, only those more or less aware of guilt, ranging from the blindly self-righteous to the repentantly self-accusing” (290). Through close readings of the novel, Leavis attempts to convey to contemporary readers the homogeneity of tone and the logic of events and actions in the novel as they stem from Dickens’s profound understanding of human motivations and conduct. For Leavis, Great Expectations not only testifies to Dickens’s mature style but provides an exemplary text for demonstrating an interpretive strategy that is able to compensate for the historical gap between Dickens and modern readers without resorting to pop psychology and anachronistic political biases.

In counterpoint to centenary celebrations of Dickens, the 1970’s also saw the blossoming of feminist readings, most of which objected to Dickens’s treatment of women as hopelessly sentimentalizing. Kate Millett’s important work Sexual Politics (1970) condemned Dickens for his reduction of female characters to “insipid goodies” (90). With its cast of manipulative, cruel, and downright creepy women, Great Expectations hardly falls guilty under this particular accusation, but it doesn’t escape the indictment that Dickens’s women are even more caricatural and unreal than his male characters. Even Margaret Oliphant, writing in 1862, labels Dickens’s portrayal of Miss Havisham as “fancy run mad” (Collins 440) and deems “the entire connection between Miss Havisham, Pip, and Estella” a failure (Collins 441). In 1983, Michael Slater admitted in his Dickens and Women that Great Expectations “is a novel without a heroine to love and admire” (282), but he attempted to attribute Dickens’s negative portrayals of women to the author’s own traumatic encounters with the opposite sex. The portrayal of Mrs. Joe stemmed, suggests Slater, from the author’s ambivalence and resentment toward his mother; Estella was a representation of the actress Ellen Ternan, the late object of Dickens’s affections; and Miss Havisham’s original was determined to be Maria Beadnell, Dickens’s early crush who abruptly broke off their love affair. Slater’s attempt to explain Dickens’s fraught relationships with women left feminist critics largely unmoved. One example of continued feminist indictment of Dickens is Monica Cohen’s Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work, and Home (1998), whose chapter on Great Expectations faults Dickens for endorsing and reinforcing the separation between home and the public sphere of work. Cohen’s reading of the novel reveals that for Dickens, home is only a good home when the women are enclosed within their proper domestic sphere: “The novel appears to place a premium on establishing and maintaining the distinction between home and work in order to mark good homes, like the Castle, from the flawed homes scattered about the rest of the novel’s terrain” (77). Some feminist critics have been more forgiving, seeing Dickens’s portrayal of women as a reflection of the attitudes of his society. Linda Raphael, for instance, asserts that “the characterization of Miss Havisham provides a model of the power of repressive forces” (Raphael 705). She outlines Miss Havisham’s repression by the circumstances of her engagement to Compeyson and her subsequent adoption of a male (and thus powerful) role in her relationship with Pip. Estella, Raphael argues, might end up being portrayed as “the angel in the house,” but “the reversal of her character remains unconvincing in contrast to the representation of her as an abused and abusing female” (709). Raphael cites Estella’s failed transformation into redemptive angel of the house as indication of Dickens’s acknowledgement of but inability to escape a society that forces women into vicious cycles of abuse, repression, domination, and cruelty. In contrast, Elizabeth Campbell’s Fortune’s Wheel: Dickens and the Iconography of Women’s Time (2003) calls on antique and medieval iconography to argue for Dickens’s empowerment of female characters in Great Expectations. In Campbell’s reading of the novel, Miss Havisham becomes “Dickens’s strangest and most symbolically suggestive Fortune” (198), a goddess-like figure playing alternately the roles of witch and fairy godmother. In Campbell’s analysis, Dickens uses the material of folklore and fairy-tale to lift his female characters beyond the constraining reality of their male-dominated society.

Post-colonial criticism is a relatively new approach to Dickens that has seized on Great Expectations as a launching point for studying England’s relations with Australia. While the novel postdates the abolition of convict transportation to New South Wales, Dickens was intensely fascinated with this aspect of England’s history. Various critics have begun to explore the symbolic function of Magwitch’s Australian exile. Grace Moore, for example, sees Magwitch’s geographic dislocation as symbolic of social exile and its consequences: “As a returned convict who has been forcibly expelled, Magwitch in Great Expectations occupies a more complex position than mere ’outsidedness’ and becomes a tool for a critique of contemporary British society. He is both insider and exile; one who has been abused by the social system and as a result come to abuse that same system” (15). Grahame Smith’s “Suppressing Narratives: Childhood and Empire in The Uncommercial Traveller and Great Expectations” argues on similar lines, suggesting that Magwitch is the “’black slave’ of the British class system, brutalized to such an extent by the body politic that its only solution is to eject him to a grotesque mirror image of itself …” (51). Post-colonial perspectives are still relatively new contributions to the work on Great Expectations and hold considerable potential for future scholars of the text.

It would be impossible to conclude a critical history of Great Expectations without mentioning one major point of the novel that has exercised critics from the late nineteenth century to the present day, a point which all scholars of the novel must wrestle with at one moment or another: the multiple endings to the novel. A brief history of these endings runs something like this: Dickens originally concluded the novel on June 11, 1861, with Pip and Estella meeting by chance in London after the former’s return from an eleven-year absence in the East. Pip leaves Estella with reflection that, after suffering abuse at the hands of her deceased husband, she now had “a heart to understand what my heart used to be” (Dickens 492). The ending suggests rather conclusively that this casual encounter is the last time Pip and Estella meet. When Dickens allowed his friend and fellow-writer Bulwer-Lytton to read the proofs of the ending, however, the latter objected strongly. “Bulwer was so very anxious that I should alter the end of Great Expectations … and stated his reasons so well, that I have resumed the wheel, and taken another turn at it,” Dickens wrote to Wilkie Collins on June 23, 1861. “Upon the whole I think it is for the better. You shall see the change when we meet” (Letters 428). In the revised and extended conclusion, Pip is away in the East for eight years and meets with Estella again on the grounds of Satis House. The novel concludes with the sentence: “I saw the shadow of no parting from her” (Dickens 358). The original ending of the novel was first discovered in Forster’s biography of Dickens in 1874, and since then critics have focused extraordinary attention on the significance of the change and debated the appropriateness of one ending over the other. Early critics—like Forster, Charles Dickens Jr., Gissing, and Chesterton—tended to favor the first ending (Rosenberg 511). Humphry House feels that the marriage to Estella is “artistically wrong” (157) and Tillotson and Butt see the new ending as inappropriate. On the other hand, many others, including Q. D. Leavis, prefer the revised ending. Leavis writes: “The preference of critics generally for the originally-planned ending to the novel instead of the one printed seems to me incomprehensible… . Dickens’s second thoughts produced the right, because the logical, solution to the problem of how to end without a sentimental ’happy ending’ but with a satisfactory winding-up of the themes. This he has done with dignity and economy” (329). Edgar Rosenberg offers an excellent summary of the debate as it currently stands as well as an account of the controversial changes Dickens made to the last sentence of the novel. Since modern editions of the novel now conventionally include both endings, the debate will undoubtedly continue and yield more new readings of the text as a whole.

The open-endedness of Great Expectations and its many narrative and interpretive gaps have stirred the minds not only of critics but of novelists and screenwriters. Contemporary novelists seem to be particularly attracted to the character of Magwitch and his years of absence in Australia. Australian novelist Michael Noonan’s book Magwitch (1982) explores Pip’s later life as he travels around Sydney, uncovering Magwitch’s history during his absence from England. Peter Carey’s novel Jack Maggs retells Magwitch’s return from his own point of view. Multiple film adaptations of the novel include David Lean’s 1946 version, a five-hour 1981 television movie, and the 1998 Hollywood adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke. Indeed, the continued circulation of Great Expectations both in critical arenas and the mass media seems to answer earlier debates over the novel’s proper sphere of influence. Ultimately, time has proven that Dickens belongs not to scholars or to casual readers but to both even as his legacy continues to challenge the divisions between high culture and popular entertainment.

Works Cited