"Pip Rescues Miss Havisham from the Fire" by Harry Furniss — Twenty-first illustration for "Great Expectations" (1910)

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Pip Rescues Miss Havisham from the Fire

Harry Furniss

1910

5 ⅜ by 3 ½ inches (13.9 cm by 9 cm)

I saw Miss Havisham, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her. I had a double-caped greatcoat on, and over my arm another thick coat. I got them off, closed with her, threw her down, and got them over her." — p. 381. [A much condensed form of the text in Chapter 49.]

Dickens's Great Expectations, Library Edition, facing p. 384.

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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Illustrated: Miss Havisham's Accidental Immolation

I looked into the room where I had left her, and I saw her seated in the ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire, with her back towards me. In the moment when I was withdrawing my head to go quietly away, I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same moment I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her, and soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high.

I had a double-caped great-coat on, and over my arm another thick coat. That I got them off, closed with her, threw her down, and got them over her; that I dragged the great cloth from the table for the same purpose, and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst, and all the ugly things that sheltered there; that we were on the ground struggling like desperate enemies, and that the closer I covered her, the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself,—that this occurred I knew through the result, but not through anything I felt, or thought, or knew I did. I knew nothing until I knew that we were on the floor by the great table, and that patches of tinder yet alight were floating in the smoky air, which, a moment ago, had been her faded bridal dress. [Chapter XLIX, 381]

Commentary: Symbolic and Very Real Flames

Her smouldering resentment of the male gender after being jilted on the very day of her wedding all those years ago and her training Estella to be a breaker of hearts results in this peculiar nemesis. Having shut herself from the light of day for much of her life, Miss Havisham has had to wander the gloomy halls of shut-up Satis House carrying candles. And, indeed, whenever she is depicted in the various nineteenth-century narrative-pictorial sequences (by Stone, McLenan, Fraser, and Green), candles are lit somewhere in the backdrop of the scene. But in this representation of the sensational death of the reclusive heiress the candles which Furniss has prominently displayed (perhaps as foreshadowing) in such scenes as Estella tells Pip of her Engagement to Mr. Drummle in Chapter XLIV disappear in the smoke haze that engulfs her sitting-room. For clarity and dramatic effect Furniss has eliminated "the ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire" (381) and made Miss Havisham's withered wedding-dress the kindling for the blaze.

In his 'double-caped great-coat' Pip vigorously attempts to stifle the conflagration, whose flames surge upwards immediately above the victim's body. She holds aloft her cane as Pip, having dragged the rotten cloth off the table (not shown), attempts to smother the flames. Furniss employs the very indistinctness of the backdrop to focus the viewer's attention on that arm and the kinetic figure of her would-be rescuer. Thus, fire, the vehicle of romance in the frontispiece, when Pip imagines the alluring Estella within the flames of the forge when he was a blacksmith's apprentice, Furniss now clarifies as dangerous and destructive, an emblem of passions run amok.

Comparable Images from Other Editions

Left: In the first American serialisation, periodical illustrator John McLenan realizes the sensational death of the brewery heiress: I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her (22 June 1861). Right: F. A. Fraser's sentimental realisation of Pip's comforting Miss Havisham as she confesses her guilt: I entreated her to rise (1876).

Other Artists’ Illustrations for Dickens's Great Expectations

Edward Ardizzone (2 plates selected)
H. M. Brock (8 lithographs)
J. Clayton Clarke ("Kyd") (2 lithographs from watercolours)
Felix O. C. Darley (2 plates)
Sol Eytinge, Jr. (8 wood engravings)
Marcus Stone (8 wood engravings)
John McLenan (40 wood engravings)
F. A. Fraser in the Household Edition (30 wood-engravings)
Frederic W. Pailthorpe (21 lithographs)
Charles Green (10 lithographs)

Bibliography

Allingham, Philip V. "The Illustrations for Great Expectations in Harper's Weekly (1860-61) and in the Illustrated Library Edition (1862) — 'Reading by the Light of Illustration'." Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 40 (2009): 113-169.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by John McLenan. [The First American Edition]. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vols. IV: 740 through V: 495 (24 November 1860-3 August 1861).

______. ("Boz."). Great Expectations. With thirty-four illustrations from original designs by John McLenan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson (by agreement with Harper & Bros., New York), 1861.

______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. The Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1862. Rpt. in The Nonesuch Dickens, Great Expectations and Hard Times. London: Nonesuch, 1937; Overlook and Worth Presses, 2005.

______. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. XIII.

______. Great Expectations. Volume 6 of the Household Edition. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.

______. Great Expectations. The Gadshill Edition. Illustrated by Charles Green. London: Chapman and Hall, 1898.

______. Great Expectations. The Grande Luxe Edition, ed. Richard Garnett. Illustrated by Clayton J. Clarke ('Kyd'). London: Merrill and Baker, 1900.

______. Great Expectations. "With 28 Original Plates by Harry Furniss." Volume 14 of the Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Co., 1910.

Paroissien, David. The Companion to "Great Expectations." Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.

Created 16 February 2007

last updated 21 October 2021