Great Expectations PDF
Preview Great Expectations
Signet Classics CHARLES DICKENS GREAT EXPECTATIONS WITH A NEW AFTERWORD R# ANNABEL DAVIS-GOFF ; d $4.95 U.S. $5.50 CAN. X) CO CoD;: 0z0 to CO i c OJ cn 30 cin (A CO o CT> en £ >EAN n BLICLIBRARY Mill POPL II - 1833 05620 4974 As a child, Charles Dickens (1812-70) came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the A infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. surprise legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary re- porter until his writing career took off with the publica- tion of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fic- tion to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished. Stanley Weintraub is the author or editor of more than fifty books of biography, culture history, and military history, including The London Yankees, Whistler, Victo- ria, and Uncrowned King: The Life ofPrince Albert. He retired from Pennsylvania State University as Evan Hugh Professor Emeritus and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies. Annabel Davis-Goff is the author of The Dower House, This Cold Country, and The Fox's Walk. All three novels were selected by the New York Times as Notable Books. She is also the author of Walled Gardens, a family mem- oir, and is editor of The Literary Companion to Gam- bling. She now teaches literature at Bennington College. PSft 2 5 2009 GREAT EXPECTATIONS Charles Dickens With an Introduction by Stanley Weintraub and a New Afterword by Annabel Davis-Goff SIGNET CLASSICS 4 SIGNET CLASSICS Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First Signet Classics Printing, September 1961 First9Sig8net7Cl6ass5ics4Pri3nti2ng1(Davis-Goff Afterword), February 2009 10 Introduction copyright © Stanley Weintraub, 1998 Afterword copyright © Annabel Davis-Goff, 2009 All rights reserved <D REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA Printed in the United States of America If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission ofthe publisher is illegal and punish- able by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. Introduction Bleak House and Little Dorrit are often considered Dick- ens's greatest works, but their dark qualitites have left them behind Great Expectations in popularity. Bernard Shaw in a memorable essay called it Dickens's "most compactly perfect book." To modern readers a novel of five hundred pages seems less than compact, but to Victorians, who pur- chased (or rented) their novels in three volumes or in monthly segments, the pace of Great Expectations was swift, and its close satisfying. Neither outcome was planned. Dickens was editor of All the Year Round, a weekly that published fiction in A serial format. novel begun there in August 1860, Charles A A Lever's Day's Ride, Life's Romance, had failedto arouse reader enthusiam. Circulation lagged as much as did Lever's sprawling narrative. By late in September Dickens realized that he would have to "strike in" and insert his own tale. Dickens had expected his novel to be serialized else- where, as usual, in twenty lucrative monthly parts, which would afford him the opportunity to gauge reader response for possible restructuring of plot or redefination of charac- terization. Instead, the story he had in mind would have to be recast in a form for weekly serialization, which meant filling, for six or seven months, about 150 of All the Year Round's closley printed pages. He broke the bad news to Lever, and on October 27, 1860, announced the appearance of Great Expectations, to begin in the issue of December 1, pushing Lever's unpopular story to the back pages. The new novel would run for thirty-six weeks, concluding on August 3, 1861. Relinquishing the monthly income from a better-paying magazine than his own was a financial blow, Introduction vi but he could not afford to bankrupt his publication by stay- ing out of it. He was then maintaining three domiciles and needed all the earnings he could secure. The quintessential Victorian man of family values had separated from his wife, Cather- ine, in 1858 and lived apart while also maintaining a mis- tress with whom he was obsessively infatuated. Despite the first-person form of Great Expectations, few elements in the plot were closely autobiographical, as in his earlier novel David Copperfield. The atmosphere of Great Expec—tations, however, reflected his preoccupations at the time his concerns with faithfulness and disloyalty, with money and gentility, with guilt and deceit. At the time the novel took—shape, Ellen Ternan was the love of Dickens's fading years furtively visited, her affec- tions purchased. Yet a life of gentility with her, given the social circumstances, remained an impossible dream. Al- though Ellen was transformed with a suggestive name into the beautiful Estella, playing opposite a projection of the novelist's boyhood, Dickens's haughty heroine may have much in her also of Maria Beadnell, who spurned him as a suitor when he was a young man with few expectations. His rejected wife, Catherine, was in some ways reflected in the new novel in Pip's elder sister, with whom he lives, and her equally uncouth husband, Joe Gargery. While grown away, in sophistication, from Catherine after twenty-three years and seven living children, Dickens could have re- mained nominally with his family by maintaining the fiction of a legal address at his former domicile. The customary life ofa gentleman ofmeans, however self-made, was often maintained among others of his sex, with a wife kept apart and at home. Sometimes a kept woman was hidden away elsewhere. But Dickens's obsession with Ellen overrode the Victorian familial code, prompting him to chance his u—nique public standing. What he risked was being found out and losing his readers and his reputation. A gentleman of prop- erty might keep a music hall dancer, but not the respected limner of family sanctity who was invited into one's home on the printed page. Almost as vicarious self-punishment, Dickens intended that his hero should be denied the woman he loved, but- working some weeks ahead—he decided to consult with his friend Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist and play-
The list of books you might like
