Great Expectations is not likely to top a list of famous sensation fiction. We typically define the sensation novel by its plot: secret identities, murder mysteries and graphic (for the Victorians) bodily horrors. While these elements arguably comprise portions of Great Expectations, more importantly, these are not necessarily the defining characteristics by which Victorian literary critics understood the genre. Instead, the Victorians understood sensation fiction primarily through the impressions it created and the physiological avenues it used to create them. The project of the novelist who wants to claim that one can read sensation fiction ethically, then, is to teach readers to connect to bodies through heightened impressions.

As the focal character of a text which is part sensation fiction, part mystery novel, part Bildungsroman, Pip Pirrip must learn to read impressions, to read clues and secrets, and to read himself. Like Boz, as the narrator of his own story, Pip has the capacity to look back and comment on his reading responses. At the same time, one would do well to suspect that Pip did not properly learn his reading lessons, for there is a disjuncture between the form of the novel and Pip's reading. Throughout his narrative, Pip struggles to navigate material language that connects him to others; instead, he has a proclivity to hold his knowledge and assumptions about others’ feelings in higher regard than their actual lived experience.

In his early reading experiences, though, Pip's model of language is profoundly material; words are a sense organ that produce bodily relationships. As he endeavours to articulate his own identity, Pip reads the inscriptions on his parents’ gravestones. From the ‘shape of the letters’ on his father's tombstone, Pip reads ‘a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair’ (Dickens 1860a: 169). His mother's inscription reads ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above’. These six words conjure an entire body: he decides that his mother ‘was freckled and sickly’ (169). But Pip does not derive this meaning from the words themselves; instead, he reads the ‘character and turn of the inscription’ (169). Through language's materiality, Pip can similarly read the five stones of his siblings’ graves, which inspire a ‘religiou[s]’ belief in five boys ‘born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, [who] had never taken them out in this state of existence’ (169).