On 1 December 1860, Charles Dickens published the first installment of Great Expectations in All the Year Round, the weekly literary periodical that he had founded in 1859. Perhaps Dickens’s best-loved work, it tells the story of young Pip, who lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith. He has few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past — the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham, and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella — and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart.
A powerful and moving novel, Great Expectations is suffused with Dickens’s memories of the past and its grip on the present, and it raises disturbing questions about the extent to which individuals affect each other’s lives. Below is a sequence of podcasts with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Great Expectations, recorded by George Miller of Podularity.
Title page of first edition of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, 1861
- What was going on in Dickens’s private life at the time?
[See post to listen to audio]
- Both Dickens and Pip were haunted by the ghosts of the past.
[See post to listen to audio]
- Are gentlemen in Victorian England born or made?
[See post to listen to audio]
- Why was Dickens persuaded to change his original ending to the novel?
[See post to listen to audio]
- Why does Great Expectations continue to hold such appeal for readers?
[See post to listen to audio]
- If you loved this novel, try…
[See post to listen to audio]
Charles Dickens was one of the most important writers of the 19th century and 2012 is the 200th anniversary year of his birth. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Great Expectations reprints the definitive Clarendon text. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s new introduction ranges widely across critical issues raised by the novel: its biographical genesis, ideas of origin and progress and what makes a “gentleman,” memory, melodrama, and the book’s critical reception.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the 
Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic shocker introduced Count Dracula to the world, an ancient creature bent on bringing his contagion to London, the very heart of the British Empire. As the horrifying story unfolds in the diaries and letters of young Jonathan Harker, Lucy, Mina, and Dr Seward, Dracula will be victorious unless his nemesis Professor Van Helsing can persuade them that monsters still lurk in the era of electric light.
The most famous of all vampire stories, Dracula is a mirror of its age, its underlying themes of race, religion, science, superstition, and sexuality never far from the surface. Below is a sequence of podcasts with Roger Luckhurst, who has edited a new edition of Dracula for Oxford World’s Classics, recorded by George Miller of Podularity.
- Vampire novels before Dracula
[See post to listen to audio]
- Why are vampires such mobile metaphors?
[See post to listen to audio]
- Roger Luckhurst explains that the Victorians thought very differently about blood.
[See post to listen to audio]
- Dracula was published in 1897, the same year as Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment and Freud coining the word ‘psychoanalysis’.
[See post to listen to audio]
- Thirty years on from the previous Oxford World’s Classics edition of Dracula what’s changed?
[See post to listen to audio]
- Finally, George Miller suggested that vampires are more multivalent monsters than zombies. Roger took issue with George’s denigration of zombies…
[See post to listen to audio]
Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He has written extensively on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, and is the editor of Oxford World Classics editions of Dracula and Late Victorian Gothic Tales.
Listen to more Oxford World’s Classics audio guides
View more about this book on the
Anne Brontë is generally less well-known than Charlotte and Emily, but her novels are just as powerful as the more famous work of her sisters, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Combining a sensational story of a man’s physical and moral decline through alcohol, a study of marital breakdown, a disquisition on the care and upbringing of children, and a hard-hitting critique of the position of women in Victorian society, this passionate tale of betrayal is set within a stern moral framework tempered by Anne Brontë’s optimistic belief in universal redemption. Drawing on her first-hand experiences with her brother Branwell, Brontë’s novel scandalized contemporary readers and it still retains its power to shock.
Below, Josephine McDonagh, who has written the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, discusses the novel and its reception in a series of podcasts recorded by Podularity.
- On Anne’s life and the imaginative world she and her siblings inhabited.
[See post to listen to audio]
- Was Anne disappointed in love?
[See post to listen to audio]
- How Anne approached the themes of women, marriage, and masculinity that also preoccupied her sisters.
[See post to listen to audio]
- How Anne structured her narrative and how the novel came to called ‘the longest letter in English literature’.
[See post to listen to audio]
- What it means to be a man in the novel.
[See post to listen to audio]
- How the book was received.
[See post to listen to audio]
Listen to more Oxford World’s Classics audio guides
Amy Mandelker has taught at UCLA, University of Southern California, Columbia, Brown, and Princeton Universities. Her books include Framing ‘Anna Karenina’: Tolstoy, the Woman Question & the Victorian Novel and Approaches to World Literature: Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’. She has revised the acclaimed Maude translation of War and Peace and recently sat down with Podularity to talk about it. (Read the audio guide breakdown here, where you can also get excerpts from this podcast.) Once you’re done, we welcome you to look back at Amy Mandelker’s blog posts and discover why Nick thinks you should read Tolstoy.
Historical lexicographer Elizabeth Knowles introduces her new book, How to Read a Word, which aims to introduce anyone with an interest in language to the pleasures of researching word histories. Previously I brought you an interview filmed by George Miller of Podularity, in which she suggested some ways to get started with word research. In the following three videos, Elizabeth gives us three one minute word histories. Click here to read more by Elizabeth Knowles.
On ‘avatar’:
Click here to view the embedded video.
On ‘Twitterati’:
Click here to view the embedded video.
On ’skulduggery’:
Click here to view the embedded video.
Historical lexicographer Elizabeth Knowles introduces her new book, How to Read a Word, which aims to introduce anyone with an interest in language to the pleasures of researching word histories. In this interview filmed by George Miller of Podularity in the library here at Oxford University Press in the UK she suggests some resources and techniques to get you started. Click here to read more by Elizabeth Knowles, and check back tomorrow for some of her One Minute Word Histories.
Click here to view the embedded video.
London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a work of literature, and a groundbreaking work of sociology. It centres on hundreds of interviews conducted by Mayhew with London’s street traders, beggars, and thieves, which provide unprecedented insight into the day-to-day struggle for survival on London’s streets in the 19th century.
In the video below, our edition’s editor, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, explains why he believes it is still well worth reading today. The interview was conducted by George Miller for Podularity. Robert has previously written this post for OUPblog.
Click here to view the embedded video.
