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"It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!"
John McLenan
Instalment 7: 5 January 1861
11.3 cm high by 8.8 cm wide (4 ⅜ by 3 ½ inches)
Dickens's Great Expectations, eighth instalment in Harper's Weekly V.
Plate 10 in the T. B. Peterson single-volume edition of 1861, facing p. 64.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated. From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air, — like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber; or it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.
I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same occurrence were important to their interests. But the black beetles took no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not on terms with one another.
These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder. In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and she looked like the Witch of the place.
“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”
With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and there and die at once, the complete realisation of the ghastly waxwork at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.
“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”
“I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.”
“It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”
She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said, leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come! Walk me, walk me!” [Chapter X, p. 5]
Perhaps because she relishes the thought of Pip's revulsion when he inspects her decaying, spider-infested wedding cake, Miss Havisham ushers the visiting labouring boy into the great dining-room of Satis House. Here, as on the morning of her wedding breakfast, the table is still laid for the festive meal that was never consumed, and the wedding that was never consumated. Pip seems curious about the cob-webbed confection as Miss Havisham leans upon him for support. in the McLenan illustration, she does not gesture, but her bony hand seems to point towards the table-top as she clings to the boy for support. In McLenan's interpretation, Miss Havisham looks more like a waxworks horror than a desiccated bride. She points out the cake without emotion here, resigned to the fate that awaits her on this very table. Beside Pip's youthful face and form, her skull-like head with its shrunken skin and cavernous eye-sockets starkly contrast the once-magnificent cake, decorated like a ship in full-sail. No candles illuminate the scene, and the room seems engulfed in darkness. A cloth covering partly discloses a large mirror above the table, but it reflects nothing.
Left: Miss Havisham and Estella (1867), from the Diamond Edition by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Centre: Marcus Stone's fanciful version of an enthroned, radiantly beautiful heiress as she must have appeared on her wedding day: Pip Waits on Miss Havisham, in the Illustrated Library Edition (1862). Right: F. A. Fraser's Household Edition version of Pip's presenting his benefactress to Joe for his apprenticeship: "Well, Pip, you know, . . . . you yourself see me put 'em in my 'at" (1876). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Left: Harry Furniss's portrait attends to convey Pip's initial impressions of Miss Havisham: Miss Havisham. Right: Charles Green's version of this same diningroom scene: "What do you think that is?", in the Gadshill Edition (1898).
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.
Barreca, Regina. "David Lean's Great Expectations." Dickens on Screen, ed. John Glavin. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2003. Pp. 39-44.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. "Chapter 16, Marcus Stone." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980. Pp. 203-209.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Il. John McLenan. Vol. IV.
______. ("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. Volume 6 of the Household Edition. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.
Paroissien, David. The Companion to "Great Expectations." Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
Created 20 November 2007 Last updated 1 December 2021