Great Expectations, published as a serial between 1860 and 1861, was the 13th of Dickens’s fifteen novels. Widely regarded as one of his masterpieces, it is arguably his most accomplished book.
Great Expectations is what critics call a bildungsroman or a ‘coming-of-age’ novel. That is to say, it is in the broadest sense about the education of the book’s protagonist and the growth of his moral awareness. Like one of Dickens’s earlier novels, David Copperfield (1849-50), the story is narrated by the protagonist himself, whose name is Pip and whom we understand to be growing and learning as the novel proceeds. Pip, like the heroes of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist (1837-38), is an orphan growing up in deprived circumstances, and the first third of the novel is devoted to his childhood. (Those attending Course Gc1 on Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Dickens’s second novel, may find it valuable to study Great Expectations by way of comparison.)
To be an orphan is to be deprived to begin with, but Pip, brought up by his unloving elder sister and her blacksmith husband, is deprived in other ways too. They live in the desolate marshland of Kent in the south-eastern corner of England in impoverished circumstances. Introduced early on to the weird and wealthy Miss Havisham and her adopted daughter Estella – another orphan but self-assured, heartlessly arrogant and (for Pip) irresistibly beautiful – he is made to feel inferior, so much so that he longs for the life of a gentleman and, as if by magic, as he approaches manhood, he is mysteriously offered such a life.
So Great Expectations is partly a novel about class and status and the power those things confer. It is also about other kinds of power – sexual attraction, brute force, institutional authority – and the closeness of established power to criminality. For though it is very much a novel of consciousness, we are constantly made aware (as we read) how the interior life is moulded by its larger social context.
The Course Director will provide some social, literary and historical background, but the bulk of our time in the classroom will be devoted to a discussion of Dickens’s text with close readings of specific passages.
Learning outcomes
- A deeper understanding of Dickens’s novel;
- The ability to read and understand Victorian fiction;
- Critical and exegetical skills.