Abandoning his weekly journal of nearly a decade, Household Words (27 March 1850 - 28 May 1859), featuring original material from various genres, Dickens had launched his new weekly of fiction, All the Year Round with a form that was relatively unconventional for him, an historical novel in a weekly format, and achieved phenomenal sales of 100,000 copies of A Tale of Two Cities. The momentum was subsequently maintained with equally strong sales of Wilkie Collins's Sensation mystery The Woman in White (26 November 1859 through 25 August 1860) in forty weekly parts. As David Paroissien remarks, Dickens had reshaped the previous journal by foregrounding original works of fiction by himself and other leading novelists. After that he hoped to publish a new novel by either Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer Lytton, George Eliot (whom he affectionately nick-named "Adam Bede"), or Elizabeth Gaskell, but settled for A Day's Ride, a "horse-racious and pugnacious" silver-fork (high society) novel by the Irish romance-writer Charles Lever. But in September 1860, Dickens wrote to his confidant John Forster, complaining that sales of All the Year Round were falling because A Day's Ride was proving a disaster. “I have therefore decided to begin the story [which had occurred to him just recently, and which he had intended for monthly serialization in twenty parts] as of the length of the Tale of Two Cities on the first of December. . . ." To Charles Lever he wrote that he would abandon the monthly design of Great Expectations “and forego its profits (a very serious consideration, you may believe)" and strike in as soon as possible, “For as long as you continue afterwards, we must go on together."

To save the valuable property that All the Year Round represented to him, Dickens submitted himself to a process he had termed “crushing." Since his weekly instalments were always much shorter than his thirty-two-page monthlies, Great Expectations has the same economy and unity as Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities. From 27 October 1860 Dickens advertised the new novel, for by the 24th of that month he had completed the first four instalments (chapters one through seven). Serialization duly occurred from the 1 December 1860, through the 3 August 1861.

Dickens's tone here is very different from that of Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities. As Henri Talon suggests, Pip's self-portrait is humorous because of the "comic observation" that comes from his "belated self-knowledge," the realization that he was "ridiculous because of his illusions and comparative self-ignorance" (6-7). But the facetiousness also, in part, compensates for the uncharacteristic paucity of humour in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens had put that behind him now. At the end of November 1859, he seems to have celebrated his release from the horrors of the French Revolution by undertaking a short provincial reading tour. He contributed a short story to the special Christmas issue of his weekly periodical, and afterwards the series of essays that were published in volume form as The Uncommercial Traveller. He had been only too pleased when his friend Wilkie Collins achieved such a success with The Woman in White. Then, as noted above, when disaster struck with the failure of Lever's A Day's Ride (18 August 1860 - 23 March 1861), the answer was clear: with characteristic good humour and well-crafted plotting, Dickens would have to come in on his own with an entirely new weekly novel, one with a very different feel to it, that would be equal parts character comedy, suspense, and bildungsroman.

Great Expectations ran in All the Year Round, IV-V, 1859-60. Pip's "Expectations" were divided into three “Stages" from the beginning. They corresponded with the three volumes in which the book was published when serialisation [thirty-six installments] came to an end. The chapter enumeration of the three-volume edition, however, began afresh with each volume, rather than continuously, as in the serial.

First Stage in All the Year Round IV, No. 84:

Second Stage in All the Year Round

Third Stage in All the Year Round

See K. J. Fielding, “Weekly Serialisation of Dickens's Novels," Dickensian 54 [1958]: 141; and J. Don Vann, Victorian Novels in Serial [New York: MLA, 1985]: 72-73).

The Manuscript of Great Expectations in The Wisbech Collection, Cambridgeshire.

The manuscript of Great Expectations was presented by Dickens to his friend the Reverend Chauncy Hare Townsend (1798-1868), who was a poet, amateur painter, and antiquarian, as well as an occasional contributor to Household Words. His interest in Great Expectations stems from his having travelled through New South Wales, Australia, as a young man. Samuel Sidney in his Emigrant Journal (1848-50) reports that nothing struck Townsend more in the colony than “the good behaviour of men who had been convicts" and that he continually asked, "why have these men been transported?" (The practice ceased in 1852.) The clergyman upon his death “bequeathed it to the town of Wisbech (Cambridgeshire), where it still lies in the Wisbech and Fenland Museum" according to Anny Sadrin in Chapter Two ("Manuscript and Memoranda") of her book on Great Expectations (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 18. She mentions that “Neither Wisbech nor the manuscript are very easy of access" (18) because the document is extremely fragile, and because the Scolar Press (1977) microfilm “is blurred and unreadable. Written in blue ink on blue paper, heavily corrected, Dickens's text is itself very difficult to decipher" (18). She cites a detailed description given by George J. Worth in Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1986), pp. 17-19. The only textual analysis which compares the ms. to the galley proofs, the All the Year Round and Harper's Weekly instalments, the 1861 and 1868 editions is that by Edgar Rosenberg, “Last Words on Great Expectations: a textual brief on the six endings," in Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 87-115.

Related Material for Positioning Great Expectations

Bibliography

Allingham, Philip V. "The Illustrations for Great Expectations in Harper's Weekly (1860-61) and in the Illustrated Library Edition (1862) — 'Reading by the Light of Illustration'." Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 40 (2009): 113-169.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vol. IV-V (24 November 1860 through 3 August 1861).

______. ("Boz."). Great Expectations. With thirty-four illustrations from original designs by John McLenan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson (by agreement with Harper & Bros., New York), 1861.

______. Great Expectations. Volume 6 of the Household Edition. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.

Fielding, K. J. "Weekly Serialisation of Dickens's Novels." Dickensian 54 [1958]: 141.

Paroissien, David. The Companion to "Great Expectations." Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.

Rosenberg, Edgar. "Last Words on Great Expectations: A Textual Brief on the Six Endings." Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 87-115.

Sadrin, Anny. "Manuscript and Memoranda." Great Expectations. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Talon, Henri. "On Some Aspects of the Comic in Great Expectations." Victorian Newsletter 42, Fall 1972): 6-7.

Vann, J. Don. "Great Expectations in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 - 3 August 1861." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. Pp. 72-73.

Worth, George J. Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1986.


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