Great Expectations Study Guide

Born to a navy clerk, Charles Dickens spent his early childhood in Kent, the setting for Pip's village in Great Expectations. When Dickens was ten, the family moved to London and his father was thrown in debtors' prison. Dickens left school and worked in a boot-blacking warehouse to help support his household. He later returned to school but left at fifteen to work as a law clerk, a court reporter, and a political journalist before devoting himself to writing full-time. His books were wildly successful both in England and in the United States, and include classics like Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Oliver Twist, still popular today. Dickens also founded a theater company and a magazine, All the Year Round. He was unhappily married to Catherine Hogarth, with whom he had ten children. Dickens was still writing when he died in 1870 and is buried in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.

The technological innovations that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century introduced the first capitalist economy, opening social and financial opportunities to people who had never had the chance to gain status or wealth under the rigid hereditary class hierarchy of the past. These opportunities enabled people born into lower classes to raise their standing in society by making money and acquiring education. The new opportunities in turn inspired ambitions that had not been possible in pre-Industrial Revolution England, where one's life path was determined strictly by birth. Great Expectations explores both the dream and the realization of such ambitions, both what is gained and what is lost, and showcases lives from all classes of nineteenth-century British society.

Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White is considered one of the earliest English mystery novels and was serialized to great success in Dickens' magazine All the Year Round just a short while before Dickens published his own Great Expectations in that same magazine. The mystery proved an ideal literary form for serialization as each installment left readers with unanswered questions, eager for the next installment. In its reliance on suspense and haunting enigma, the mystery form also drew on the Gothic literary tradition of the early nineteenth century. In Great Expectations, intricate plot twists and the secret of Pip's anonymous patron show the influence of the Gothic tradition as well as of the nascent mystery novel. In addition to being literary peers, Collins and Dickens were lifelong friends and collaborators.