"Hold me! I'm so frightened!" (Vol. V, page 205) — twenty-seventh wood-engraving for Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, first published in Instalment 19, serialised in Harper's Weekly V for 6 April 1861, Chapter XXIX. 11.7 cm by 12 cm wide (roughly 4 ½ inches square) Plate 21 (facing p. 144 in the T. B. Peterson single-volume edition of 1861). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Passage Illustrated: Trabb's Boy Endeavours to Humiliate Pip Publically
Casting my eyes along the street at a certain point of my progress, I beheld Trabb’s boy approaching, lashing himself with an empty blue bag. Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb’s boy smote together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace, “Hold me! I’m so frightened!” feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance. As I passed him, his teeth loudly chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme humiliation, he prostrated himself in the dust. [Chapter XXIX, 213]
Commentary: The Ebullient Village Burlesquer satirizes Pip
One has the distinct feeling that Trabb's boy is a touchstone for Pip, a signifier of what Pip might have become had he never left the village. In this illustration for the nineteenth instalment, the dry-goods chandler's shop-assistant, Trabb's boy, to the left, mocks Pip for his gentlemanly pretensions when the two meet in the village highstreet, outside the post-office. Wearing his "blue bag" as if it were a great-coat, Trabb's boy does a brilliant burlesque of Pip, playing to the audience of shoppers on the high street. His criticism of Pip's snobbish is both pointed and public. He struts in the text, but seems electrified in the illustration as he mocks Pip's snobbishness by drawling in an affected London accent, "Don't know yah!"
The satire is not lost on Pip, who had complacently admired an appropriate 'cheerful briskness' in the gait of Trabb's boy and the light of 'honest industry' beaming in his eyes as he walked determinedly to his place of employment. Gentlemen, by contrast, were exhorted not to be seen in a 'hurry': a man of sense, Thomas Tegg [1848] noted in his comments on manners, 'may be in haste, but he is never in a hurry . . . .' [Paroissien, 259]
McLenan realizes the situation in an interesting manner, juxtaposing the pair of obvious rustics just emerging from the old, half-timbered house converted into the new post office with the elegantly dressed young London gentleman in the foreground. McLenan has deliberately made the background buildings look appropriate to the setting of the high street in a country village, and complements this unsophisticated backdrop with crudely drawn figures, including that of the postmaster (right) and Trabb's shop-assistant, shag-haired and roughly bearded, but certainly a "boy" no longer.
Other Editions' Versions of the Confrontation in the High Street
Left: Sol Eytinge, Junior's 1867 portrait of the sarcastic shop apprentice: Trabb's Boy, in the Diamond Edition. Centre: F. W. Pailthorpe's version of the confrontation between Pip and Trabb's boy: Trabb’s Boy (1885). Right: F. A. Fraser in the Household Edition realistically sets the scene, with Trabb's boy playing to his peers as he burlesques Pip: Drawling to his attendants, "Don't know yah, don't know yah!" (1876).
Related Material
- Dickens's Great Expectations in Film and Television, 1917-2000
- Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
- Bibliography of works relevant to illustrations of Great Expectations
- The Genres of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations
- Fantasy Versus Reality in the Bildungsroman
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 (4 photogravure plates)
- Sol Eytinge, Jr. (8 wood engravings)
- Marcus Stone (8 wood engravings)
- Frederic W. Pailthorpe (21 engravings)
- F. A. Fraser in the Household Edition (29 wood engravings)
- Harry Furniss (28 plates)
- Charles Green (10 lithographs)
Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
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. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vols. IV and V (1860-61).
______. ("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.
______. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. XIII.
______. Great Expectations. Volume 6 of the Household Edition. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.
______. Great Expectations. "With 28 Original Plates by Harry Furniss." Volume 14 of the Charles Dickens Library Edition (18 vols). London: Educational Book Co., 1910.
Paroissien, David. The Companion to "Great Expectations." Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
Created 20 November 2007 last updated 15 December 2021