Great Expectations

In the autumn of 1860, Charles Dickens was in trouble. His weekly magazine, All the Year Round, was losing readers. A serial by his friend Charles Lever had failed to grip the public, and sales were sliding week by week. Dickens decided to rescue the magazine himself, with a new novel of his own.

He was living at Gad's Hill Place in Kent, a house he had walked past as a poor boy and been told he might own one day if he worked hard enough. He had bought it in 1856. But his life there was not settled. He had separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858, in a scandal he tried hard to manage in public. That September of 1860 he burned decades of his letters in a field behind the house.

Out of that came Great Expectations, the first-person story of Pip, a blacksmith's apprentice who is suddenly given money by an unknown benefactor and moves to London to become a gentleman. Dickens had written a first-person orphan's life once before, in David Copperfield, so he reread that book to be sure he was not repeating himself. He said the rereading affected him so much he was left, in his own word, unmanned.

The weekly format shaped the writing. Weekly parts are short, so Dickens had to cut hard and keep every chapter turning. The result is his tightest long novel. It ran from December 1860 to August 1861, and it worked: circulation recovered.

One famous change came at the end. Dickens had written a bleak final meeting between Pip and Estella, the girl he loves, in which they part for good. His friend the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton read it and objected, so Dickens rewrote the close into something warmer and more open. Both endings survive, and readers have argued about which is better ever since.

The book's afterlife is enormous. Miss Havisham, the jilted bride sitting in her rotting wedding dress with the clocks stopped, became one of the most recognised figures in English fiction. The novel has been filmed many times, most famously by David Lean in 1946, and rewritten from other angles, as in Peter Carey's Jack Maggs.