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Fiction

Notes

Did u know? Dickens published some of his best-known novels including A Tale of Two
Cities and Great Expectations in his own weekly periodicals.
The inspiration to write a novel set during the French Revolution came from Dickens’ faithful
annual habit of reading Thomas Carlyle’s book The French Revolution, first published in 1839.
When Dickens acted in Wilkie Collins’ play The Frozen Deep in 1857, he was inspired by his
own role as a self-sacrificing lover. He eventually decided to place his own sacrificing lover
in the revolutionary period, a period of great social upheaval. A year later, Dickens went
through his own form of social change as he was writing A Tale of Two Cities: he separated
from his wife, and he revitalized his career by making plans for a new weekly literary journal
called All the Year Round. In 1859, A Tale of Two Cities premiered in parts in this journal.
Its popularity was based not only on the fame of its author, but also on its short length and
radical (for Dickens’ time) subject matter.
Dickens’ health began to deteriorate in the 1860s. In 1858, in response to his increasing fame,
he had begun public readings of his works. These exacted a great physical toll on him. An
immensely profitable but physically shattering series of readings in America in 1867-68 sped
his decline, and he collapsed during a “farewell” series in England.
On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died. He was buried in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Though he left The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, he had already written fifteen substantial
novels and countless shorter pieces. His legacy is clear. In a whimsical and unique fashion,
Dickens pointed out society’s flaws in terms of its blinding greed for money and its neglect
of the lower classes of society. Through his books, we come to understand the virtues of a
loving heart and the pleasures of home in a flawed, cruelly indifferent world. Among English
writers, in terms of his fame and of the public’s recognition of his characters and stories, he
is second only to William Shakespeare.

11.1.2 Introduction to Great Expectations

When Dickens started his thirteenth novel, Great Expectations, in 1860, he was already a
national hero. He had come from humble beginnings, working as a child in a shoe polish
factory while his family was in debtor’s prison, to become the quintessential Victorian gentleman.
He was involved in all aspects of English life: writing, acting, producing, going on book tours,
publishing magazines, and, as always, active in social welfare and criticism.
Amidst all this, however, Dickens’ private life had entered a dark period. Dickens had just
separated from his wife two years earlier, there were rumors of an affair with a young actress
in the newspapers, and he was spending more and more time at his home in Chatham.

Dickens himself had risen to achieve greater expectations than any clerk’s boy could expect,
but he had not found happiness, the idea that one must search beyond material wealth and
social standings and look within themselves for happiness becomes the major theme in Great
Expectations.

Some time in 1860, Dickens had started a piece that he found funny and truthful and thought
it might do better as a novel: “...it so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial
revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner,” he wrote. Dickens had told friends that
he had gone back and read David Copperfield and was quite struck by the story now that he
looked back upon it. Copperfield was a happy novel, the story of a young man who came into
his fortune though hard work and luck. Its influences and similarities are seen in Great Expectations.
There are, however, some major thematic differences.

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