# of Words: 298

One chilly and misty evening, a tiny boy meets an escaped offender on the marshes near England's coast. No, it is not the launching of a TV crime drama (though it may be)--it is the beginning of one of Charles Dickens' most renowned novels: Good Expectations. With two chapters Weekly, Great Expectations (along with other serialized novels like it) were as close as Victorian England got to Breaking Bad or Mad Men.

People waited patiently each week to the next "incident" to arrive at the newsstands and on the shelves--and you will see why. Dickens was a master of the serialized novel, writing sections filled with cliff-hangers and nail-biting action, while staying true to the novel's overall storyline. His stories worked in bits and as a cohesive whole--not an easy task. (Only ask J. J. Abrams.)

When Good Expectations began its conduct, Charles Dickens was already world-famous, but his magazine All the Year Round was fighting. He came up with a plan: rather than rescue the story he had sketched out to get a cooler and better-paying publication, he chose to conduct it into his own magazine.

The novel was a significant success. While England was developing wealthy and powerful at the age of colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, Dickens saw the injustice that ran rampant among the working and lower classes. He documented Britain's underbelly and researched the struggle for survival at a time of such wealth.

Nevertheless, it is not all doom and gloom. Sure, there are broken hearts, glimpses into London's dark criminal underworld, and sufficient child abuse to make you wish to phone protective services. At the exact same time, it is filled with hilarious characters and small slice-of-life sketches which, exactly like any serialized TV series, will keep you returning for more.

Related Papers

Bartleby The Scrivener Herman Melville

Released in 1853, "Bartleby the Scrivener" is one of American author Herman Melville's most often-read and studied works (that is really saying a whole lot, considering that the man also penned several classics, such as Moby-Dick and Billy Budd). "Bartleby" is really a departure from the sea-faring adventures that Melville frequently presented to readers; in reality, this can be a story where the most fascinating thing that happens is in fact the simple fact that nothing really happens. The......Read More

Henry VI, Part 1 William Shakespeare

Does Shakespeare make you feel somewhat nervous? Dude is a fairly major deal, after all. But fear not. It has a lot of the very same things which make George Lucas's cinematic masterpieces crowd pleasers for the ages. Much like Episode 1 of all Star Wars, Henry VI, Part 1 has some significant political intrigue going down, such as betrayal, scheming, plotting, along with lightsaber duels. Alright, not too much on the lightsaber duels--however there really are a great deal of battles and......Read More

Dubliners James Joyce

For the majority of the last hundred decades, in case you wanted an interactive geographical adventure of Dublin--the sights, the sounds, and particularly the folks--you could not do much better than read the fifteen connected short stories of James Joyce collection. Most editions of the collection contain two or three city maps from the landing pages, but it becomes fairly clear early on that the stories themselves produce a much better map of the Irish capital because they dig deep into the......Read More

Related Topics