Life & Background
Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. When he was twelve his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea and the boy was sent to work pasting labels in a blacking factory — an episode he concealed for decades and returned to obsessively in his fiction. He worked as a legal clerk and then a parliamentary and newspaper reporter, developing the shorthand accuracy and ear for speech that mark his prose. The Pickwick Papers made him famous at twenty-four, and he published almost everything thereafter in monthly or weekly parts, editing his own journals and responding to sales as he wrote. He gave enormously popular public readings, separated from his wife Catherine in 1858 after twenty-two years and ten children, and died in 1870 leaving Edwin Drood unfinished.
Great Expectations
Pip, an orphan raised roughly by his sister and her kind husband Joe Gargery, helps an escaped convict in the marshes as a child. Taken to the decaying house of Miss Havisham, jilted on her wedding morning and stopped in time, he meets the beautiful Estella, whom she is raising to break men's hearts, and becomes ashamed of his forge and his family. An anonymous benefactor gives him a fortune and he goes to London to become a gentleman, assuming Miss Havisham is the source and Estella the intention. The benefactor proves to be Magwitch, the convict, returned illegally from Australia. Pip's expectations collapse, Magwitch dies after a failed escape, and Pip is left to recognise the value of what he abandoned.
The novel is a bildungsroman that indicts the very ambition it narrates: Pip's education into gentility is presented as a moral corruption, and the money that funds it is traced back to a convict, so that the polite world and the penal colony are shown to be financially continuous. Dickens's method combines caricature with symbol — Miss Havisham's stopped clocks and rotting cake, Jaggers washing his hands after each client — and his serial form produces the strong chapter-end and the wide cast of recurring types. The novel exists in two endings; Bulwer-Lytton persuaded Dickens to replace the original bleak parting with the more ambiguous version usually printed.
Why Dickens Matters
Dickens created the modern mass reading public and demonstrated that serial fiction could carry sustained social criticism — of the Poor Law in Oliver Twist, the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, utilitarian schooling and industrial towns in Hard Times, and bureaucratic obstruction in Little Dorrit. His character-making, from Micawber to Fagin, remains the standard reference for the type in fiction. For examinations he is the centre of the Victorian novel paper: serialisation and its formal consequences, urban representation, childhood, and the social-problem novel.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Pickwick Papers1836–37
- Oliver Twist1837–39
- A Christmas Carol1843
- David Copperfield1849–50
- Bleak House1852–53
- Hard Times1854
- A Tale of Two Cities1859
- Great Expectations1860–61
- Our Mutual Friend1864–65