CHARLES DICKENS’S GREAT(EST) EXPECTATION: THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
CHARLES DICKENS’S GREAT(EST) EXPECTATION: THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

Summary/Abstract: Academics, critics and readers frequently adopt a rather stereotypical view on Charles Dickens’s literary work. Supposedly, the author of David Copperfield stands out as a remarkable story-teller and, implicitly, as a very popular writer, both during his lifetime and post mortem, but he pays a significant price for this popularity, nevertheless. The tribute in question would consist in an inevitable lack of intellectual sophistication, presumably manifest throughout his novels. Commentators generally argue that he was more interested, as a novelist, in addressing large and heterogeneous groups of Victorian consumers of literature than in shaping profoundly parabolic and symbolic textual constructions. Ultimately, this represents a critical prejudice and, therefore, the present paper aims at asserting the opposite. Undoubtedly, Dickens can be a very deep and subtle artist in his prose. The example used henceforth to demonstrate the above mentioned thesis will be the masterpiece Great Expectations, which remains, at least as far as the overall structure of the plot is concerned, a traditional melodrama. In the context of a close reading of this work, the more you immerse yourself into the narrator’s subjective universe of perceptions, the more you realize Dickens’s artistic endeavour has a formidable design. The need of the reader to uncover it, even after more than a century and a half since the first publication of the novel in the form of magazine serial installments (between 1860 and 1861), becomes a hermeneutic and scholarly urgency.

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