In your plan: Week 37, Thu, 1 Jul 2027.
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Overview
Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's novel of a poor orphan, Pip, who is raised by his sister and her kind husband Joe Gargery, and who comes into a mysterious fortune. Told by the older Pip, it follows his rise into London society and the moral cost of his snobbery and ambition. It is a story about gratitude, class, guilt and the difference between being a gentleman by money and by character.
Context
The novel was published weekly in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round between December 1860 and August 1861, then in book form. Victorian England was changing fast, with a growing middle class, new money, and anxiety about status. Dickens had known poverty and shame as a child and he returns to those feelings here in a tighter plot than in many earlier works.
Read the full guide: chapter summaries, competing interpretations, key terms
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Curator's notes
- Why it matters
- Ambition, snobbery, gratitude; Hard Times attacks "facts only" education.
- Use in training and coaching
- Career ambition and values; Hard Times for education reform
- Connects to
- Austen; Marx's critique; social reform
- What to read
- Great Expectations whole
- Text (date)
- Dickens, Great Expectations; Hard Times (1854, 1861)
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