Dickens’ Great Expectations was very successful in the period, being one of the few

reflective books of Victorian age. It follows the story of Pip in his journey from childhood to
adulthood and presents esentialy many of the Victorian elements of England like social class
difference, industrialization, Victorian houses, Victorian values and women. In early October
1860, Dickens gave Forster this account of the novel he was writing: “The book will be written
in the first person throughout, and during these first three weekly numbers you will find the hero
to be a boy-child, like David [Copperfield]. Then he will be an apprentice. You will not have to
complain of the want of humour as in The Tale of Two Cities” (Letters 9: 325). The essence of
Great Expectations was therefore already distilled in Dickens’s mind. It was to be an
autobiography like David Copperfield, but published in weekly parts rather than in monthly
numbers. Unlike the central character of David Copperfield, the new boy-hero was to be born
into the social class where becoming apprenticed to a trade was normative. David, the “young
gentleman” to his workmates at Murdstone and Grinby’s, had been obliged to experi- ence
being déclassé and had found the process agonizing. Pip, by contrast, would follow the artisan
norms of his class. The new novel would also be essentially humorous unlike its predecessor in
All the Year Round. Forster must have privately expressed his disquiet at the “want of humour”
in A Tale of Two Cities, and he was to reassert this criticism when he later wrote that “there
was probably never a book by a great humour- ist with so little humour and so few
rememberable characters” (Forster bk. 9, ch.2). Great Expectations was therefore to revert to
an established Dickens type: the humorous, first-person narrative, but with a distinctively
working-class central character. In the same letter of October 1860, Dickens expanded on his
conception of the nub of the plot and the essential narrative mode of Great Expectations:I have
made the opening in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured
foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which
the story will turn too – and which indeed, as you will remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic
conception that first encouraged me. To be sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I
read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly
believe. (Letters 9: 325) (David Paroissien- A Companion to Charles Dickens: 423)