This study sets out to recover and illuminate the Victorian culture and allusive verbal worlds that inform Charles Dickens's novel "Great Expectations" How distinctive are the story's temporal and topographical settings? How carefully has Dickens integrated Pip's life story with the embedded histories of a mad  jilted spinster  a beautiful orphan girl  an unscupulous 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 gentleman have to the revised controversial ending Dickens adopted on the advice of a fellow novelist? David Paroissien draws on a range of 19th century sources to illuminate the novel's late Georgian and mid-Victorian contexts: the brutal punishments that characterized Hanoverian England's legal system  the transportation of felons and their rough lives in Australia's first penal colony  the social mobility a public school education conferred on a swindler and forger  the struggle to gain the desired status of "gentleman" among brewers  bakers and a raw yound blacksmith from the country ignorant of the ways of society and its social graces  the genteel city of Rochester  whose quiet nooks and stately historic houses excercised a powerful hold over Dickens's imagination  the nearby Hoo peninsular  with its lonely marsh villages and picturesque churchyards  and the changing face of early 19th century London  with its Inns of Chancery and Inns of Court  the vibrant life of the Thames  where watermen struggle against steamers as technological changes brought the old and the new face to face  and the river's lower  deserted reaches  bound by mists  marshes and tidal flats  which serve as background for the novel's brilliant menacing opening