Between December 1860 and August 1861 Pip’s story was eagerly followed by readers of Charles Dickens’s journal All the Year Round, in which Great Expectations ran as a weekly serial. Regularly selling over 100,000 copies each issue, the magazine was subtitled ‘The story of our lives from year to year’, a quotation adapted from Shakespeare’s Othello, perhaps intended to add cultural clout to the popular periodical.
In beginning a ‘coming of age’ novel charting the hero’s progress from childhood through adolescence and youth to a hard-won maturity, readers might have expected such a ‘story of our lives’ to unfold within the traditional Victorian family, typically headed by an authoritative bread-winning father supported by a wifely domestic angel nurturing a brood of children. What they found in Great Expectations was a dark subtext undermining this ideal, for positive examples of parenting are almost entirely missing from the story of Pip’s life.
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