"All the Year Round" IV, 84 (1 December 1860) (original) (raw)

Commentary: A TransAtlantic Serialisation

After plummeting sales revealed that Charles Lever's A Day's Ride was not proving a sufficient draw to retain the interest of his readers, Dickens took decisive action. He led the 1 December 1860 number with a new serial of his own creation, even though he had (apparently) originally conceived of Great Expectations as a novel equal in length to that of David Copperfield. And, having learned from his attempts at issuing illustrated monthly numbers of a novel simultaneously with unillustrated weekly instalments, Dickens did not repeat the errors of A Tale of Two Cities. There would be no competing monthly instalments.

Great Expectations ran through thirty-six weekly numbers, from 1 December 1860 through 3 August 1861, without illustrations. However, American readers experienced a very different serial in the pages of Harper's Weekly, which initiated serialisation earlier (24 November 1860), and included forty composite woodblock engravings by American artist John McLenan. Ahead of the last month's serial instalments, on 6 July 1861 Chapman and Hall published the entire story in an unillustrated triple-decker, priced 31 shillings 6d, with each volume corresponding to one of the three "Stages" of the novel from All the Year Round. The first British illustrated appeared the following year as the Illustrated Library Edition, with eight full-page woodblock engravings by Marcus Stone.

Related Materials

• First page of the novel serialised in Harper's Weekly
• First page of first number
• Great Expectations in Film and Television, 1917 to 2000
• Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
• Bibliography of works relevant to illustrations of Great Expectations
• Marcus Stone's Eight Illustrations for Great Expectations (1862)
• John McLenan's Forty Illustrations for Great Expectations (1860-61)
• F. A. Fraser's Twenty-nine Illustrations in the Household Edition (1876)
• Crime in Victorian England

Bibliography

Allingham, Philip V. "The Illustrations for Great Expectations in Harper's Weekly (1860-61) and in the Illustrated Library Edition (1862) — 'Reading by the Light of Illustration'." Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 40 (2009): 113-169.

Davis, Paul B."Dickens, Hogarth, and the Illustrations for Great Expectations." Dickensian 80, 3 (Autumn, 1984): 130-143.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by John McLenan. [The First American Edition]. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vols. IV: 740 through V: 495 (24 November 1860-3 August 1861).

______. ("Boz."). Great Expectations. With thirty-four illustrations from original designs by John McLenan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson (by agreement with Harper & Bros., New York), 1861.

______. Great Expectations. All the Year Round. Vols. IV and V. 1 December 1860 through 3 August 1861.

_______. ("Boz."). Great Expectations. With thirty-four illustrations from original designs by John McLenan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson (by agreement with Harper & Bros., New York), 1861.

_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. The Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1862. Rpt. in The Nonesuch Dickens, Great Expectations and Hard Times. London: Nonesuch, 1937; Overlook and Worth Presses, 2005.

Stone, Harry. "Great Expectations." Dickens' Working Notes for His Novels. Chicago and Londobn: U. Chicago Press, 1987. Pp. 314-325.

Created 3 December 2021