e population tripled during the time of Queen Victoria s reign-and society shifted from one of ownership and property to one of manufacture and trade. While the beginning of the nineteenth century and the effects of the Industrial Revolution brought poverty and persecution for the laboring class, a series of reforms in the 1830s and 1840s helped to stabilize both the economy and the population.acts restricted child labor and limited hours of employment, and the erection of the Crystal Palace in 1851 celebrated the beauty - rather than the strife - lof the Revolution s technological innovation.Darwin s treatise The Origin of Species, published in 1859, put this progress in the context of evolution and natural selection . And so, in 1860, the story of a boy s confusion-riddled rise from impoverished orphan to city gentleman grew slowly from a the seed of Dickens s letter to his friend John Forster, describing «a little piece I am writing ... Such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me ... I can see the whole of a serial revolving around it, in a most singular and comic matter ». Expectations is at once an elegy for the lost innocence of lower-class rural population - who, like the Gargerys of Rochester, toiled in the countryside of his childhood - and a critical analysis of the broadening gap between illusion and reality that came with the hopefulness of reform, socia mobility, and ever increasing commerce. In order to successfully render this transformation, Dickens s scholar David Paroissien says the author needed to use first-person narration and maintain a dual focus: «Pip looks back to those events of his life set in Regency England but tells them from a present he belongs to, the now of the relating time. »Through his protagonist, Pip, Dickens sought to define and question the motivations and forces behind a rise in social status and the prejudices surrounding the divide between high society and the base criminal world.advocate of free trade, Dickens was sickened by the cruelty overcrowded London inflicted upon its inhabitants. His depictions of Smithfield market and Newgate prison serve as reminders of the filthy, teeming, bloody world of questionable justice during this era. But since Pip s story begins not in the present time but rather in the early part of the century, Dickens appealed to readers by depicting Pip as looking back from a current perspective, with some of theand maturity that wouldn t be available to a young, «common labouring boy» in the beginning of the century.faith and investment was necessary for a writer who constructed his plot as a series of bite-sized chunks. As the editor of the weekly journal All the Year Round, Dickens had to contend with the journal s plummeting sales following the failure of novelist Charles Lever s serialized publication of his A Day s Ride.Expectations appeared in weekly installments in both All the Year Round and Harper s Weekly from December 1860 to August 1861. This format, though challenging for the writer, brought him a broad readership that only improved his career. Dickens used the serial constraints as structural features in the novel, shaping plot around his need to have a continual series of beginnings and endings and maintaining suspense throughout the work.Expectations does not fall neatly into any particular genre. It does have aspects of domestic realism - which by 1860 was characteristic of Dickens s contemporaries such as Thackeray, El...
