Great Expectations (novel)

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Reprinted in Harper's Weekly , illustration by John McLenan

Big Expectations (original title: Great Expectations ) is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens , which was first published between 1860 and 1861 in individual sections as a serial in the weekly magazines All the Year Round and Harper's Weekly . For the second time since David Copperfield , Dickens uses the first person perspective to tell the checkered life story of the orphan boy Pip. This penultimate novel Dickens is now counted among the classics of British literary history.

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The seven-year-old orphan boy Philip Pirrip, called Pip, lives around 1812 with his cold-hearted older sister and her friendly but suppressed husband Joe Gargery. Gargery works as a blacksmith, the family has little money. One evening, Pip was visiting his family's grave in the village cemetery when he met an escaped prisoner named Magwitch, whom he was helping to break free from his chains. A little later, however, Magwitch is picked up again by the police when he starts a fight with another convict who has also escaped. The acquaintance of the wealthy old maid Miss Havisham, who is still wearing her old wedding dress with which she was once left, offers a change in his previously rather bleak life. She has sworn vengeance on the male world and raised her adopted daughter Estella to be a loveless creature who is supposed to take revenge on the male sex in her place. She is looking for a boy to play with Estella. She is recommended to Pip by Uncle Pumblechook, the uncle of the blacksmith Joe. In the following period he visits Estella and Miss Havisham regularly. Finally, after several years, Pip, like his brother-in-law Joe, is also set to become a blacksmith. Meanwhile, Pip's sister is assaulted, leaving her in a mentally confused state.

Surprisingly, Pip is visited by the lawyer Mr. Jaggers, who tells him that he has received a large sum of money from an unknown benefactor and that he should enjoy a noble upbringing as a gentleman. He should come to London immediately . Pip thinks Miss Havisham is his secret benefactress because she has always been kind to him. So he says goodbye to Miss Havisham and her daughter Estella, whom he secretly adores. In London he meets Miss Havisham's cousin Matthew Pocket, who is supposed to raise him, and Herbert Pocket, whose son he becomes a friend. In London he wastes his money, breaks with simple relatives and leads the life of a snob. Eventually Pip's benefactor - Magwitch, the convict he once helped - returns illegally from deportation to Australia , where he had become rich. The secret of the unknown benefactor Magwitch, who was incited to crimes by the fraudster and marriage swindler Compeyson, is revealed. Several pre-history crimes are highlighted and some complicated relationships between main and minor characters are clarified. For example, Pip learns that Estella, who has meanwhile married a brutally good-for-nothing, is Magwitch's daughter. Pip tries to help Magwitch escape the country, but fails. Magwitch, who is sentenced to death, dies in the presence of Pip as a result of his attempt to escape. His fortune will be confiscated, and with that end the great expectations of Pip who will henceforth earn his money abroad. When he returned to Joe Gargery's smithy after years and reconciled with Joe, the widowed, meanwhile refined Estella and Pip finally found each other.

Developmental background

Great Expectations first reprinted in All the Year Round in December 1860

In the fall of 1860, sales of the weekly All the Year Round, published by Dickens from 1859 until his death, fell sharply, as Charles Lever 's The Day's Ride was not well received by the readership. To save the edition, Dickens stepped in with Great Expectations , which was originally intended to be a shorter work ( "little piece" ). As the idea developed, Great Expectations was initially planned as a serialized novel in twenty monthly episodes. However, due to the decline in sales of All the Year Round , Dickens decided to write the novel for this magazine in much shorter, weekly chapters.

At the same time Dickens sold the publication rights for Great Expectations to the New York weekly Harper's Weekly , which reprinted the novel as a sequel from November 1860 to August 1861 with illustrations by John McLenan.

Dickens originally wrote a darker ending in which Pip and Estella only meet for a short time and Estella then marries another man in a second marriage. It was only on the advice of his writer friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton that Dickens gave his novel a happy ending, says John Forster in his Dickens biography. Both Forster and George Bernard Shaw criticized Dickens' decision.

Impact history

From a literary point of view, Great Expectations is counted among the most successful works by Dickens. In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars voted the novel number four on the list of the most important British novels . Only Virginia Woolf's novels To the Lighthouse ( The Drive to the Lighthouse , 2nd place) and Mrs Dalloway (3rd place) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1st place) were given greater importance.

Despite its complexity in the plot, the novel Great Expectations is characterized by poetic unity and concentration; According to JH Miller, he impressively expresses the author's characteristic worldview with a "clarity and symbolic density" that Dickens "never surpassed".

In Great Expectations the author also grasps the child's psyche with great understanding ; Due to the specific design of the theme of the lost child and the “poetic evocation of childish fears and dreams”, the novel is given a special place in Dickens' oeuvre in this respect as well.

From a stylistic point of view, the novel with its differentiated levels of mood and association stands on the threshold between the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Great Expectations formally fits into a popular genre of nineteenth-century narrative literature: the Bildungsroman . This type of novel focuses on the growth and personal development of the protagonist (here: Pip) from childhood to adulthood. This genre became popular through works such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Dickens' David Copperfield . Each of these novels focuses on the process of maturation and self-discovery, in which the protagonist develops from a child to an adult.

Movies and TV series

literature

Bibliographies
  • George J. Worth: Great Expectations: An Annotated Bibliography . New York: Garland 1986.
General
  • Paul Schlicke (Ed.): Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens . New York: Oxford University Press 1999.
  • John O. Jordan (Ed.): The Cambridge companion to Charles Dickens . New York: Cambridge University Press 2001.
  • Mary Hammond: Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. A Cultural Life, 1860-2012. Farnham: Ashgate 2015.
Individual representations
  • Brian McFarlane: Screen Adaptations: Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. A close study of the relationship between text and film. Ed. by Imelda Wheleham. London: Bloomsbury 2008. ISBN 978-0-7136-7909-0

Web links

Commons : Great_Expectations  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See e.g. B. Hans-Ulrich Seeber: The novel of the 19th century . In: Hans-Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 263-292, here p. 282.
  2. ↑ See J. Hillis Miller: Charles Dickens' Great Expectations . In: Willi Erzgräber (Ed.): English Literature from Blake to Hardy - Interpretations Volume 8 . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1970, pp. 230-260, here p. 231.
  3. ↑ See John McLenan's Harper's Weekly Illustrations of Great Expectations . On: The Victorian Web . Retrieved February 11, 2015.
  4. ↑ See also THE TWO ENDINGS . At: academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu . Retrieved February 11, 2015.
  5. ↑ See Charles Dickens: Great Expectations . Guild Publishing, London 1980. Foreword.
  6. ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed January 2, 2016
  7. ↑ See J. Hillis Miller: Charles Dickens' Great Expectations . In: Willi Erzgräber (Ed.): English Literature from Blake to Hardy - Interpretations Volume 8 . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1970, pp. 230-260, here p. 231f.
  8. ↑ See Hans-Ulrich Seeber: The novel of the 19th century . In: Hans-Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 263-292, here p. 282.
  9. ↑ See Fantasy Versus Reality in the Bildungsroman . On: The Victorian Web. Retrieved February 11, 2015.