Great Expectations, read as five moments
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Great Expectations reached its readers one weekly installment at a time, in the magazine All the Year Round, with a new chapter due whether or not Dickens felt the book was ready.
Read against a five-moment grid for a writing day (capture, the session, the turn to structure, revision, output), this novel is the clearest case on this list of a documented, consequential revision, and of a structural moment worked out in private all the same, before the serial began and while it ran.
Capture
The novel opens with the boy Pip alone in a churchyard, terrorized into helping an escaped convict named Magwitch.
One encounter turns out to generate the entire plot: Magwitch is later revealed as the secret source of Pip's fortune. It is anything but unremarkable at the time: the scene terrifies Pip (“I was dreadfully frightened”), and Magwitch later tells him he swore “that time” that his money would go to the boy. It's as clean an example of a single seized moment shaping everything after it as the form offers.
Dickens's own capture is on record too. In 1860, writing a short paper, he told his biographer John Forster that “such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me” that he could “see the whole of a serial revolving on it”. Forster: “This was the germ of Pip and Magwitch.”
The whole book, worth noting, is narrated by Pip as an adult looking back on his own younger self, which means every one of these five moments arrives twice over: once as it happened, and again as it's remembered and told.
The churchyard scene isn't only a capture inside the plot. It's also the first thing the older, narrating Pip chooses to capture for us, out of an entire childhood he could have started from somewhere else.
The session
The book was published in weekly installments in All the Year Round, a serial structure that shaped how its middle stretch had to move.
Readers experienced Pip's London years, his rising expectations and his slow disillusionment, one week at a time, spaced by a printing schedule rather than by any private rhythm of the writer's own.
The turn to structure
Serialization didn't do away with the private moment. Dickens did not use his usual number plans for this book, but planning notes survive with the manuscript at Wisbech: the characters' ages, the tide ranges for chapter 54, the draft of an ending. Before the first part appeared he wrote that he had “got in the pivot on which the story will turn”, and on 22 May 1861, with the book nearly finished, he hired a steamer from Blackwall to Southend to check the course of a boat for Magwitch's escape.
The shape had to stay legible from week to week for the serial to hold its readers, continuously, rather than getting discovered once at an internal pivot two-thirds through.
Revision
This is the most documented single revision in the book, possibly on this whole list. Dickens first wrote a bleaker close in which Pip, walking in Piccadilly with little Pip, meets Estella for a short interview; she has married again, to a Shropshire doctor, and Pip stays “a solitary man”.
On the advice of a fellow novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, he rewrote it into the version that was published, which leaves the possibility of reunion open. The meaning of the book's final page changed after the rest of the manuscript was otherwise finished.
Output
Because each weekly installment carried its own printing deadline, delivering the manuscript in the shape a reader expects wasn't one event saved for the end. It happened dozens of times over, at every week's cutoff, long before the final chapter existed in any form.
Revision is where this novel puts almost all its visible weight: an entire ending, replaced, on record, at the suggestion of another writer. The turn to structure had its private moments too, less visibly: the pivot was in place before the first part appeared, and the river chapter was prepared in a day on the Thames in May 1861, while the installments kept coming.
Dickens took a single outside note on his last page and published only the new ending; the first survives in a note of Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens, whose last volume is dated 1874, four years after Dickens's death. Taking somebody else's suggestion on how a draft ends doesn't cost a writer ownership of the book.