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| Great Expectations, a weekly serial |
The Grandma has started to read a new Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations. She has also continued with her English grammar manual Intermediate Language Practice. Today, she has revised Chapter 18.
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel: a bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person.
The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most memorable scenes, including the opening in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch.
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. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith.
The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most memorable scenes, including the opening in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch.
More information: BBC
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. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith.
Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
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| Joe and Pip in Great Expectations |
As Dickens began writing Great Expectations, he undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours.
His domestic life had, however, disintegrated in the late 1850s and he had separated from his wife, Catherine Dickens, and was having a secret affair with the much younger Ellen Ternan.
The introduction of the 1984 Penguin English Library edition suggests that the reluctance with which Ellen Ternan became his mistress is reflected in the icy teasing of Estella in Great Expectations.
His domestic life had, however, disintegrated in the late 1850s and he had separated from his wife, Catherine Dickens, and was having a secret affair with the much younger Ellen Ternan.
The introduction of the 1984 Penguin English Library edition suggests that the reluctance with which Ellen Ternan became his mistress is reflected in the icy teasing of Estella in Great Expectations.
Dickens and Wills co-owned All the Year Round, one 75%, the other 25%. Since Dickens was his own publisher, he did not require a contract for his own works. Although intended for weekly publication, Great Expectations was divided into nine monthly sections, with new pagination for each.
Harper's Weekly published the novel from 24 November 1860 to 5 August 1861 in the US and All the Year Round published it from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861 in the UK. Harper's paid £1,000 for publication rights. Dickens welcomed a contract with Tauchnitz 4 January 1861 for publication in English for the European continent.
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| Pip & Biddy and Orlick in Great Expectations |
Publications in Harper's Weekly were accompanied by forty illustrations by John McLenan; however, this is the only Dickens work published in All the Year Round without illustrations.
Great Expectations's single most obvious literary predecessor is Dickens's earlier first-person narrator protagonist David Copperfield.
The two novels trace the psychological and moral development of a young boy to maturity, his transition from a rural environment to the London metropolis, the vicissitudes of his emotional development, and the exhibition of his hopes and youthful dreams and their metamorphosis, through a rich and complex first person narrative. Dickens was conscious of this similarity and, before undertaking his new manuscript, reread David Copperfield to avoid repetition.
More information: The Guardian
The narrative structure of Great Expectations is influenced by the fact that it was first published as weekly episodes in a periodical. This required short chapters, centred on a single subject, and an almost mathematical structure.
Although the novel is written in first person, the reader knows, as an essential prerequisite, that Great Expectations is not an autobiography but a novel, a work of fiction with plot and characters, featuring a narrator-protagonist.
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| Joe learning to read in Great Expectations |
In addition, Sylvère Monod notes that the treatment of the autobiography differs from David Copperfield, as Great Expectations does not draw from events in Dickens's life; at most some traces of a broad psychological and moral introspection can be found.
Amongst the narrative devices that Dickens uses, are caricature, comic speech mannerisms, intrigue, Gothic atmosphere, and a central character who gradually changes.
It's important the close network of the structure and balance of contrasts, and praises the first-person narration for providing a simplicity that is appropriate for the story while avoiding melodrama. There is the symbolism attached to great expectations as reinforcing the novel's impact.
Great Expectations contains the elements of a variety of different 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.
More information: The Telegraph
The title's Expectations refers to a legacy to come, and thus immediately announces that money, or more specifically wealth plays an important part in the novel. Some other major themes are crime, social class, including both gentility, and social alienation, imperialism and ambition.
The novel is also concerned with questions relating to conscience and moral regeneration, as well as redemption through love.
There are dark shadows on the earth,
but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
Charles Dickens
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