Each Norton Critical Edition includes an authoritative text, contextual and source materials, and a wide range of interpretations-from contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory-as well as a bibliography and a chronology of the author's life and work.

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

The Text of Great Expectations

 Adopted Readings

 Textual Notes

 Launching Great Expectations

 Writing Great Expectations

 A Note on Dickens's Working Plans

 The Descriptive Headlines

 Putting an End to Great Expectations

Backgrounds

 Dickens's Letters on Great Expectations

 Anuy Sadrin·A Chronology of Great Expectations

 Jean Callahan·The (Unread) Reading Version of Great Expectations

 Harry Stone·The Genesis of a Novel: Great Expectations

Contexts

 DICKENS AND THE WORLD OF PIP

James T. Fields·[Dickens among the Tombstones]

Edgar Rosenberg·Dickens in 1861

Humphry House·[Pip's Upward Mobility]

Robin Gilmour·[The Pursuit of Gentility]

 CHILDHOOD LESSONS

Charles Dickens·[Captain Murderer]

Mrs. Sherwood·[“Naterally Wicious: Many a Moral for the Young“]

The Newcastle Commission·[Dame Schools and Bible Studies]

 REFORMATORY: DOWN AND OUT IN LONDON AND BOTANY BAY

William Sykes·[On Gibbeting]

Sir Henry Hawkins·[Firing a Rick and Breaking the Sabbath]

Jeremy Bentham·Of Transportation

A Convict's Recollections of New South Wales

 THEATRICAL

Samuel Richardson·The Apprentice's Vade Meeum [A Gloss on George Bamwell]

Henry Fielding·[Hamlet Before Wopsle]  

Criticism

 CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS AND EARLY COMMENTS

From The Saturday Review·[Diekens's Comeback]

From The Spectator·[“The Most Successful of His Works Have Been His Most Incoherent“]

Henry Crabb Robinson·[“I Would Rather Read a Good Review of It“] [E. S. Dallas]·[Dickens as Serial Writer]

 From The Dublin University Magazine·[Dickens's Tiresome Clowning]

 E[J. M. Capes and ]. E. E. D. Acton]·[“Dickens Knows Nothing of Sin When It Is Not Crime“]

 [Mrs. Oliphant]·]“Specimens of Oddity Run Mad“] George Oissing·[Dickens's Shrews]

ESSAYS

 E. M. Forster·[Autumnal England]

 Bernard Shaw·Introduction to Great Expectations

 George Orwell·Charles Dickens

 Humphry House·G. B. S. on Great Expectations

 Dorothy Van Ghent·On Great Expectations

 Julian Moynahan·The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations

 K. J. Fielding·The Critical Autonomy of Great Expectations

 Christopher Ricks·Great Expectations

 Ian Watt·Oral Dickens

 Peter Brooks·Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations

 David Gervais·The Prose and Poetry of Great Expectations

 Michal Peled Ginsburg·Dickens and the Uncanny:Repression and Displacement in Great xpectations

 Linda Raphael·A Re-Vision of Miss Havisham:  Her Expectations and Our Responses

 Susan Walsh·Bodies of Capital: Great Expectations and the Climacteric Economy

Charles Dickens: A Chronology

Selected Bibliography