he
form, tone, and humour of Great Expectations derive from
Dickens's economic and editorial concerns, as well as from more personal ones. Having
just completed the historical novel A Tale of Two Cities for
All the Year
Round in the autumn of 1859, Dickens celebrated his release from the horrors
of the French Revolution by undertaking a short
provincial reading tour. He contributed a short story to the special Christmas issue of
his weekly periodical, and afterwards the series of essays that were published in volume
form as The Uncommercial
Traveller. But of course the mainstay of his weekly periodical would have to
be a serialised novel, and the thirty-first and ultimate instalment of
A Tale of Two Cities had
appeared on 26 November 1859 (3 December 1859 in
Harper's
Weekly in the United States).
Left: Charles Dickens as he appeared in Harper's Weekly (24 November 1860): 740 — "taken from a very recent photograph."
As a busy editor, Dickens was in no hurry to write another novel for weekly serialization himself, and was delighted with his friend Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, which ran serially in All the Year Round from 26 November 1859 through 15 August 1860. After the huge success of that sensation novel, Dickens hoped to publish a new novel by either Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer Lytton, George Eliot (whom he had affectionately nick-named “Adam Bede"), or Elizabeth Gaskell; however, he had finally settled upon A Day's Ride, a "horse-racious and pugnacious" silver-fork (high society) novel by the Anglo-Irish romance-writer Charles Lever.
In September, 1860, Dickens wrote to his confidant John Forster, complaining that sales of All the Year Round were falling because Lever's A Day's Ride was proving a disaster for weekly sales:
I have therefore decided to begin the story [which had occurred to him just recently, and which he had intended for monthly serialization in twenty parts] as of the length of the Tale of Two Cities on the first of December. . . .
To Charles Lever he wrote that he would abandon the monthly design of Great Expectations “and forego its profits (a very serious consideration, you may believe)" and strike in as soon as possible, “For as long as you continue afterwards, we must go on together." To save the valuable property that All the Year Round represented to him, Dickens submitted himself to the process of producing a weekly serialisation, a process which he had termed “crushing."
Related Material
Bibliography
Damkjaer, Maria. Chapter 5, "The Function of Fiction: Selling and Filling the Magazine." Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. Pp. 131-152.
House, Madeline, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, eds. The Letters of Charles Dickens. The Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Vol. 9 (185-1861).
Created 9 November 2000
Last modified 14 April 2025