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GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and speciaUsts to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the imderstanding of om- readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.
General Adviser Keith Carabine Rutherford College University of Kent at Canterbury
INTRODUCTION
Great Expectations, Dickens's thirteenth novel, was first pubhshed in the pages of his weekly magazine All the Year Round between December i860 and August 1861. Although it was begun in some haste, with htde time for the careful forward planning that had marked its predecessors, it is nevertheless one of the best organised and most well constructed of all novels, with scarcely a wasted gesture, character or event. As one gets to know the book, it seems as if there is no fat at all on it, no detail that does not resonate with the whole. Each episode, from the appearance of the mysterious convict in the first chapter to the ambiguities of the final scene, is important in its own right, adds to the richly sjmibohc structure of the book and plays its part in the shapely and decisive plot. When he wrote Great Expectations, Dickens bad been at the top of the literary tree for the best part of a quarter of a century. He was the author of novels that had shaped the Uterature of the age and the creator of characters that had become proverbial. But his more recent works -