In the Passages of Desire: Great Expectations

Abstract

Just three years, and one full-length novel, A Tale of Two Cities, separate Little Dorrit from the first instalment of the last Dickens novel to be considered, Great Expectations (1860–61). During those years, however, a dramatic change occurred in Dickens’s own domestic circumstances: his separation from his wife in 1858, amid great publicity, and the beginning of his relationship with the young actress, Ellen Ternan.¹ It is no wonder, then, that the newly emancipated ‘bachelor’ Dickens should seek to apply the Gothic imprisonment plot to a male character, nor that he should show an increasing interest in male experience of sexual desire, as well as sexual guilt.