As you look at the way the book appeared in its first, serial publication, see if you can discover

  1. how Dickens took advantage of the chapter or pairs of chapters that he doled out to readers to structure his novel;

  2. if a different structure appears in the triple-decker edition of 1861 and in the one-volume editions in which present-day readers encounter Great Expectations; and

  3. any fundamental different of effect, mood, or narrative structure between this work's periodical publication and those that appeared in four and eight installments.

All the Year Round, Volume IV, 1860-1861

All the Year Round, Volume V, 1861

The 1861 three-volume edition

In this first book publication of the novel, Volume I contained the first nineteen chapters, each of which corresponds to the identifcally numbered one in All the Year Round. The chapter numbering begins again, however, for the second and third volumes, so that Volume II, Chapter I = Chapter xx in All the Year Round, and Volume III, Chapter I = Chapter xl in All the Year Round.

This information is based on Appendix C in Margaret Caldwell's 1993 Clarendon Press edition of Great Expectations. Thanks to Eva Burkowski for picking up some typos!


Economics

Last modified 4 December 2004