was printed on the nonfiction side to make sure he agreed with
what was said. He published articles on subjects he cared about,
written by himself and by staff members and stringers, and long
and short works of fiction that he solicited from other authors and
often contributed himself.

A Tale of Two Cities, the novel that directly preceded Great Ex-
pectations, appeared weekly in All the Year Round from April 30
to November 26, 1859, and cemented the successful establishment
of the new magazine. The successor serialization was Wilkie Collins's
The Woman in White, which also hit the jackpot. In an edi-
torial announcement, Dickens had said, "It is our hope and aim,
while we work hard at every other department of our journal, to
produce, in this one, some sustained works of imagination that
may become a part of English Literature." So far, so good.

The Collins work was followed by Charles Lever A Day's Ride,
a Life's Romance. Lever had had considerable novelistic success,
but this effort was a turkey, and a damaging blow. Sales of the
magazine plummeted. Dickens owned the publication and could
not watch its value decline with equanimity. He acted at once. "I
called a council of war at the office. It was perfectly clear that the
one thing to be done was, for me to strike in" ( EJ964). He had
originally planned Great Expectations as a monthly serial, to be
published in twenty thirty-two-page instalments, but now he had
to compress everything in order to fit the weekly format of All the
Year Round. The instalments had to be brief and crisp, the overall
length curtailed.

Dickens bounced the Lever work to the back of the book, and
Great Expectations became the opener of each issue, beginning
December 1, 1860, and ending August 3, 1861. It accomplished its
intended goal. All the Year Round thrived for the rest of his life,
its 300,000 circulation substantially exceeding that of the London
Times.

At the core of the novel is a twist on the Horatio Alger theme,
popular in all ages, of the poor boy who makes good. Pip (Philip)
Pirrip is an orphan, raised harshly by his much older sister and
benignly by the gentle giant, his brother-in-law. Unlike Alger's he-
roes, however, his translation to a higher sphere occurs through
no effort of his own. He seems intended to be the prince and to
marry the princess. Hubris sets in. Catastrophe follows. Humilia-
tion leads to humility and thus to humanity. Debtor's prison threat-

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