Charles Dickens is the most famous and popular English author of the 19th century, and Great Expectations is often regarded as his finest work. A compelling and superbly constructed novel, it combines Dickens's gifts for masterly prose and for the creation of memorable characters with his penetrating capacity for psychological and social analysis. The dramatic story of Pip's journey from high hopes to devastating disappointment offers profound insights into Victorian society and into the workings of human desire.

In this Readers' Guide, Nicolas Tredell introduces and sets in context the key debates about a novel which has provoked an immensely rich critical response. The extracts and essays included here examine Great Expectations in structural, symbolic, political, psychological, social and sexual terms, relating it to its own time and to a range of 20th century critical and theoretical perspectives. Exploring secondary sources from the first reviews in the 1860s to the most up-to-date critiques of the 1990s, the Guide is an essential resource for the study of one of Dickens's most complex novels.