Charles Dickens publishes the first installment of…

Charles Dickens publishes the first installment of Great Expectations in his magazine All the Year Round on December 1, 1860.

A bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip, it is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person.

 The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-nineteenth century and contains some of Dickens's most memorable scenes, including the opening in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch.

Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery—poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death—and has a colorful cast of characters who have entered popular culture.

These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith.

Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.

Great Expectations, which will be popular both with readers and literary critics, will be translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.