ABSTRACT
Great Expectations comes at a crucial stage in Dickens's career. When he started to write it in the autumn of 1860, his life no longer conformed to the conventional pattern of men of his age and class, nor to the public image his readers had come to have of him. Great Expectations opens in the Kent countryside which Gad's Hill overlooked, and is set chronologically not in the contemporary world of 1860 but in the early years of the nineteenth century when Pip and his creator were children. By 1860 Dickens was able to stand back from his own experience and see it in its totality. Yet Great Expectations is not in any obvious sense an autobiographical novel: the very irony which distinguishes Dickens's handling of Pip's story indicates a distancing objectivity, a complete imaginative mastery of personal elements and their transformation into representative fable.
