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Page 22
In an effort to pick up declining sales of All the Year Round , Dickens once again published a novel in weekly installments of the journal. Great Expectations ran from December 1, 1860, to August 3, 1861. Dickens and Catherine had recently separated after over twenty years of marriage. Perhaps in an attempt to come to terms with his personal unhappiness, Dickens returns to the first person narrator in Great Expectations. To assure that he did not fall into "unconscious repetition" as he wrote this story of a "hero to be a boy-child, like David," he reread David Copperfield.
Pip is "raised by hand" by his shrewish older sister and her husband, Joe Gargery, whom Pip treats "as an older species of child." Pip comes into Great Expectations as the result of befriending the convict, Magwitch, but is led to believe that it is actually the eccentric and half-mad Miss Havisham to whom he is indebted. Pip is also under the misapprehension that the beautiful Estella, Miss Havisham's daughter by adoption, will become part of his inheritance. Pip's real education begins when he realizes that Magwitch is his benefactor and that he has betrayed the loving Joe for the false society made available by ill gotten gains from an escaped convict. His redemption comes as the result of his coming to love and value Magwitch, who, he realizes, has been much truer to Pip than Pip has been to Joe.
