Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The author’s penultimate finished novel, Great Expectations (1861) was the introductory Dickens novel of choice for many late 20th century readers—particularly American high schoolers, who often encountered 19th-century English fiction first through this novel. I credit Dickens’s move, toward the end of his career, from monthly to weekly serialization for the novel’s success with modern readers. The longer, looser novels of his early and middle period—Oliver Twist, for example, or David Copperfield—come down from the rambling and rumbustious 18th-century novel, from Defoe and Fielding.