Why Great Expectations?

Why should Kent make a fuss over this book?

• It is one of the most admired works of one of the most famous of all English writers: a book that stands comfortably alongside the major achievements of the past 200 years of European artistic activity.
• It was written in Kent and set in Kent, by a man who loved Kent and lived there.

Dickens spent five important years of his childhood in Chatham, and three of his brothers and sisters were born there. It was in the Medway Towns that he first went to the theatre and first discovered the joys of reading; he was to celebrate many of these memories in his later works. In 1859 he returned to the area and moved into Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, a rich and famous man. Here he wrote large parts of his final works.

Great Expectations begins, unforgettably, in a landscape based on that Dickens knew from his long walks out on the marshes between the Thames and Medway. Many local places appear recognisably in its pages, including the Guildhall and Restoration House in Rochester and churches at Cooling and Higham.