GREAT EXPECTATIONS, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT

Great Expectations (1861) was the last of Dickens's weekly serials. The huge pressures attendant on serialization, which Dickens had been finding more and more burdensome in the course of his development as a monthly serialist, were suddenly enhanced at this fairly late stage in his career. He had been feeling the need for more time to devote to thinking about and planning his novels, and now he found himself with less. A Tale of Two Cities, the novel that immediately preceded Great Expectations, had also been a weekly serial, and Dickens had been so unsettled by the constrictions of the weekly instalment that he wrote to Forster in August 1859 that ‘nothing in the mere way of money… could also repay the time and trouble of the incessant condensation’ (L. ix. 112). During the composition of Great Expectations, he further complained to Forster that: ‘As to the planning out from week to week, nobody can imagine what the difficulty is without trying’ (L. ix. 403).

‘Nothing in the mere way of money’, according to Dickens in 1859, could compensate for the ordeal of weekly serialization. And yet it was not simply a reduction in the temporal scale of the instalments of work required to produce the text of Great Expectations that exerted a peculiar pressure on Dickens at this time, because the book was conceived of and written in circumstances that intensified the usual financial imperative that lay behind Dickens's work. The immediate stimulus to the composition of the book was in fact a very urgent need to make money. He needed it to revive the flagging fortunes of his new periodical All the Year Round, which had started successfully with the serial publication of A Tale of Two Cities, in April 1859, and which had been sustained by the extraordinary popularity of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, but which had started to nose-dive with the publication of Charles Lever's A Day's Ride. Sales began to drop, as Dickens had anticipated they might, and he saw no alternative but to contribute a new novel of his own. ‘It was perfectly clear’, he told Forster, ‘that the one thing to be done was, for me to strike in.