Which British novelist wrote 'Great Expectations'?

Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations. The novel follows Pip, an orphan whose sudden financial prospects lead him from a rural childhood into London's aspirational world.

Dickens first published the story as a serial in All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861, with the book edition appearing later in 1861. Its opening in a Kent churchyard introduces Pip and the escaped convict Abel Magwitch, while later episodes feature the eccentric Miss Havisham, Estella, and the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery.

The title refers to Pip's expectation of inheriting wealth, but the novel questions whether money and social status produce genuine happiness or moral worth. It is both a bildungsroman, tracing Pip's development, and a Gothic, comic, and crime-inflected Victorian novel.

Readers sometimes confuse Dickens's authorship with that of William Makepeace Thackeray, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy because all are major British novelists. Dickens also wrote Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Bleak House, but Great Expectations is specifically his thirteenth novel.