Upon its release, the novel received near universal acclaim. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes.The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story). Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel.

Great expectations by charles dickens