ABSTRACT
When Dickens died at Gad's Hill on the evening of 9 June 1870, a Press Association telegram instantly wired the news to newspaper editors all over the British Isles, and almost as quickly via the same means it reached the American press and thus Dickens's fans on the other side of the Atlantic. It is fitting that the demise of the world's first and foremost Industrial Age author could so swiftly become a topic of transatlantic news, since it happened through the same means that had propelled him to stardom and through which he and his publishers had managed his international career. The publication and reception contexts of Great Expectations in the 1860s were, as I have already demonstrated, of a markedly different character on each side of the Atlantic. The Manchester Times claimed: 'Mr Dickens has not merely shown us to posterity, he has shown us to ourselves'.
