Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel: a bildungsroman that depicts the private growth and personal improvement of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's 2d novel, after David Copperfield, to be completely narrated within the first person.[N 1] The novel became first posted as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall posted the radical in three volumes.