"This new study sets out to recover and illuminate the Victorian culture and allusive verbal worlds that inform the novel. How distinctive are the story's temporal and topographical settings? How carefully has Dickens integrated Pip's life's story with the embedded histories of a mad, jilted spinster, a beautiful orphan girl, an unscrupulous con man, a fierce yet tender convict and a brilliant criminal lawyer? What relevance does the then of Pip's childhood and the now when he relates the story of his evolution into a gentleman have to the revised, controversial ending Dickens adopted on the advice of a fellow novelist?" "David Paroissien draws on a range of nineteenth-century sources to illuminate the novel's late Georgian and mid-Victorian contexts."--BOOK JACKET.