GE, Chapters 01 - 02

[Kim]

This illustration, is by C. E. Brock

[Everyman]

Tristram wrote: "Here's another one about toilet paper: ..."

I don't believe there's another group in Goodreads, maybe not in the world, that could turn a discussion into the first two chapters of a Dickens novel into a discourse on toilet paper, including posts about leaves, torn up newspapers, and Seinfeld.

[Kim]

I absolutely agree with you. I was wondering the other day as I was looking for the beginning of toilet paper why I was doing it in the first place, but I just kept going. :-)

[Tristram]

I remember there was some toilet paper mention made in Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, and so it is a respectable topic. I wonder why people hardly ever bring it up.

I like C.E. Brock, by the way, although he hardly seems to conjure up the novel's bleakness. This could be on the lid of a cookie box.

[Xan]

There's too much light in Brock's depiction, but he's nailed my images of the convict and Pip. I can hear the convict saying . . .

" Now you bring me widdles, a file, and toilet paper, you hear me."

[Mary Lou]

Xan Shadowflutter wrote: "There's too much light in Brock's depiction, but he's nailed my images of the convict and Pip. I can hear the convict saying . . .

" Now you bring me widdles, a file, and toilet paper, you hear me.""

Do you think he's expecting snow? ;-)

[Bionic Jean]

I like that illustration. Chocolate-boxy and all, it captures the expressions and demeanour well :)

[Kim]

"He seized me by the chin"

A. A. Dixon

1905

Illustration for the Collins Pocket Edition, facing the title-page

Text Illustrated:

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin."

Commentary

"One of the memorable scenes in English literature is that in which Pip encounters an escaped convict in the churchyard near his home on the Medway marshes, the actual counterpart of the physical setting being the precincts of the parish church of St. James at Cooling, Kent, within an easy walk of Dickens's country home, Gadshill Place. So stunning an opening to the novel made it a logical choice for the opening illustration in almost every nineteenth-century edition, beginning with the Harper's Weekly serialization. In the initial volume edition, American illustrator Felix O. C. Darley elected to realize the apprehension of the struggling convicts on the marshes shortly afterward, a highly dramatic moment that conveniently permitted him to introduce blacksmith Joe Gargery and the second convict, as well as Pip and his criminal. Whereas, however, Darley had only two frontispieces with which to work and introduced only four principal characters, most of the other illustrators of nineteenth-century editions of the novel have been able to introduce a much greater range of characters because their pictorial programs were much longer. Even Dixon, with just seven illustrations to complete, has been able to emphasize the roles of Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, Joe, Jaggers, and Orlick, necessarily omitting such secondary characters as Herbert, Pumblechook, Wopsle, and Wemmick. Another such limited but effective program is that of Dickens's chosen illustrator for the volume editions of 1862 and 1864, Marcus Stone.

Like Stone, but unlike the book's first illustrator, John McLenan, Dixon had likely read the entire novel in advance of illustrating it, and therefore informed each of his illustrations with a thorough knowledge of the plot and the characters' places within it. Appreciating, for example, the importance of establishing the protagonist-narrator as a lonely child and of the fateful figure of the convict in the boy's life, A. A. Dixon in the 1905 Collins' Pocket Edition depicts both the setting, the figures, and their juxtaposition with almost photographic precision — in contrast to the impressionist verve and dynamism of the opening scene by Harry Furniss in The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910). Dixon is faithful to Dickens's text: the church tower and graves, with the Pirrip headstone to the left, correspond exactly with Pip's narrative. In fact, Dixon may have even taken the trouble to visit Cooling in preparing his illustrations since the village church with its square tower and side-chapel corresponds fairly closely with the actual building six miles north-west of Rochester. On the other hand, Pip's reference to a steeple on the building is not supported by the tower at Cooling, but suggests instead that Dickens had in mind the church of St. Mary at Lower Higham nearby.

However, Dixon fails to show the convict's muddy condition, despite the ragged condition of his grey penal uniform — nor does the figure exhibit the nettles, briars, and cuts that the narrator so vividly describes. Dixon's convict is not, like Furnss's convict, savage or violent, but merely curious as he begins to interrogate the boy. Perhaps the result of historical research into incarceration practices to which transported felons were subjected, the leg-irons in this picture are somewhat different from the leg-irons and manacles one sees in the other illustrations.

Paroissien cites an 1829 description of the manacling of the legs of transportees:

On their arrival at the hulks, from different gaols, [convicts] are immediately stripped and washed, clothed in coarse grey jackets and breeches [as opposed to trousers], and two irons placed on one of their legs, to which degradation every one must submit, let his previous rank have been what it may. (A Treatise on the Police and Crime of the Metropolis, 1829, 365, quoted in Tobias, 1972, 141) [Paroissien 30]

[Haaze]

Thanks for posting these illustrations, Kim!
Pip seems so well dressed in this picture. His socks and shoes do not look like something a boy would wear as he ventures out in the marshes or am I just showing my ignorance of the clothing poor children wore at the time? However, I like it so much more than the Brock illustration in msg 151. The convict looks better in that one though. It is interesting how different artists envision the encounter.

[Mary Lou]

I like the Dixon drawing, particularly the prominence of the shackles. Pip is a little more grown here than I imagine him, though -- particularly when I think ahead to Joe carrying him on his shoulders.