Reading Order
Great Expectations Reading Order
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61, serialized; 1861, book) is Dickens's most formally perfect novel — the story of Pip, a blacksmith's apprentice in the Kent marshes who receives an anonymous fortune and goes to London to become a gentleman, only to discover the corruption at the heart of his 'great expectations' and the true nature of wealth, class, and love. It is the finest English bildungsroman and a searing critique of Victorian class ideology.
Where to start
Great Expectations
Complete Great Expectations Book List
- 1Buy
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens·1861·The complete novel. Available in many editions; the Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by Charlotte Mitchell is widely recommended. Start here. - Buy
David Copperfield
OptionalCharles Dickens·1850·Dickens's own favorite of his novels — another first-person bildungsroman with strong autobiographical elements, often read alongside Great Expectations as the two poles of his portrait of a life. - Buy
Bleak House
OptionalCharles Dickens·1853·Dickens's most ambitious novel — a dual-narrative satire of the English legal system, featuring one of literature's great detectives and a panoramic cast of Victorian England. The choice for readers who want Dickens at his most expansive.
Great Expectations — Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Great Expectations have two endings?
Great Expectations originally appeared in serialized form in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round between December 1860 and August 1861. The original ending Dickens wrote was a brief, sad conclusion in which Pip meets Estella — now widowed and remarried — by chance in a London street, they exchange a few words, and part forever, Pip recognizing that the suffering she went through after marrying the brutal Drummle has finally given her the capacity for feeling she lacked as a girl. His friend Bulwer-Lytton read the ending and argued that readers would find it too bleak; Dickens rewrote it to provide a more ambiguous, potentially happy ending set at Satis House, in which Pip and Estella part holding hands as the mist rises, with the famous (and deliberately ambiguous) closing line: 'I saw no shadow of another parting from her.' Most modern editors and readers prefer the original ending as truer to the novel's vision and themes; both are included in standard editions.
Who is Pip's mysterious benefactor in Great Expectations?
The novel's central mystery — who has been providing Pip's income and turning him into a gentleman — is revealed in Chapter 39 to be not Miss Havisham, as Pip has assumed, but Abel Magwitch, the convict Pip helped in the marshes at the opening of the novel. Magwitch transported to Australia, prospered as a sheep farmer, and has been spending his wealth to turn 'his boy' into the gentleman he himself can never be — vicariously living through Pip the life that his birth and criminal record denied him. The revelation is devastating for Pip, not only because it destroys his romantic fantasy of being Miss Havisham's chosen heir but because it reveals that the 'gentleman' Pip has become is the creation of a convicted criminal, and that the class distinction between himself and Magwitch that he has internalized and acted on is morally hollow. Dickens uses the reversal to expose the arbitrariness and corruption of the class system that the novel has been critiquing throughout.
Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.