How Does Dickens Appeal To Victorian Readership In

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Great Expectations was first published in 1860 to 1861 as a serial novel. This meant that small instalments (normally a chapter) of the novel would come out about once a month in a newspaper or magazine. This method was similar to our modern day soap operas: each instalment ended in cliffhangers and were widely talked about by the Victorian readers. This method of novel writing was dying out, before Dickens revived it again. However, Dickens, like previous serial novel writers, wrote each instalment to a deadline, not written in whole and broken up. This meant that Dickens could have changed his original storyline to suit what the readers’ reactions and opinions to it were. The majority of the readers of this story were the middle and upper classes. The middle class readers loved to read books that included people moving up class ranks, as they wanted to move up classes too. The upper class read them purely for their own enjoyment. However, the Victorians enjoyed different things in their stories that we do today –including books about criminals. The Victorians liked reading books that had crime in because it took them away from their dull life styles. They also enjoyed seeing criminals being hanged as they thought they were ridding the world of evil and often used such event as a family outing. Because of Great Expectations’s criminal aspect, it was a very popular book at that time. There are many things Dickens added to Great Expectations so that the Victorians enjoyed his book even more and so that they felt a variety of emotions for every character at different times of the story. This includes how we feel about Pip in the opening chapters. Dickens immediately makes the readers feel sympathy towards Pip as story begins, when he is placed in front if his parents’ graves. “…my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than
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