For Dickens, his imagined world was the real one. So we may read Great Expectations as a kind of poem, a number of whose recurring images come together when, one night in London, Pip hears a footstep on the staircase, while outside the river flows on, the wind and rain continue, and church bells toll the hour. Coming late, in 1861, in the sequence of great novels, Great Expectations absorbs these materials from Dickens's world, making the powerful staircase scene not only the climax of this story, but a high point in the whole of Dickens's creation. Great Expectations, driven by a lunatic and a criminal, seems at last regretful, in mourning for the story of folly, betrayal, deluded hopes and doomed illusions it has to tell, as Pip is indeed ashamed of what he must record.

Meanwhile the rain of years has fallen steadily upon the human scene, shaping events so that Pip and Estella are led back inevitably once more to the ruined garden, never to part again.We take this phrase as our own title, seeing it charged with a meaning that makes the story's ending the only one possible.The rain of years then compels, ensures, their last meeting, as it stands for accumulated experience, all that has happened to make Pip and Estella different from the way they were at their first encounter. It contains Pip's own story as he tells it—at once a confessional story and a record of his emotional experience of fear, shame, and remorse.

At the end of his excellent survey of essays, articles, and reviews on Great Expectations (Columbia: 2000), Nicolas Tredell offers a seeming invitation. Since “adding to the store of commentary on Great Expectations is possible, permissible, and perhaps irresistible… there shall never be a lack of critics compelled to pursue this astonishing story…”

Thus encouraged, we read this masterpiece not only for its own sake, but as drawing toward itself themes and images from Dickens’ preceding volumes, reaching fulfillment in one powerful, climactic scene.Our reading becomes a meditation then on the world as Dickens has imagined it.The passages chosen make up an anthology to increase the reader's pleasure, as he hears the sound, the music of Dickens throughout. For the rest, the general idiom is from the common stock of Dickensian studies.