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Estella and Pip in Miss Havisham's Garden
Harry Furniss
1910
7.6 x 3.8 inches
"Let us make one more round of the garden," said Estella. "You shall be my Page, and give me your shoulder." Her handsome dress had trailed upon the ground. She held it in one hand, and with the other lightly touched my shoulder. — p. 226
Dickens's Great Expectations, Library Edition, facing p. 225.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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“What is the matter?” asked Estella. “Are you scared again?”
“I should be, if I believed what you said just now,” I replied, to turn it off.
“Then you don’t? Very well. It is said, at any rate. Miss Havisham will soon be expecting you at your old post, though I think that might be laid aside now, with other old belongings. Let us make one more round of the garden, and then go in. Come! You shall not shed tears for my cruelty to-day; you shall be my Page, and give me your shoulder.”
Her handsome dress had trailed upon the ground. She held it in one hand now, and with the other lightly touched my shoulder as we walked. We walked round the ruined garden twice or thrice more, and it was all in bloom for me. If the green and yellow growth of weed in the chinks of the old wall had been the most precious flowers that ever blew, it could not have been more cherished in my remembrance. [Chapter XXIX, 226]
The Annotated Dickens provides the following caption, which is not in the original Gadshill Edition: "Estella walking in the garden at Satis House: her other hand lightly touched my shoulder as we walked" (Ch. 29). The presence of the scene (together with Pip's seventeen appearances in Furniss's twenty-eight full-page illustrations) in the 1910 narrative-pictorial sequence emphasizes the Bildungsroman qualities of the first-person narrative; Furniss constantly alludes to the novel's romantic plot-line by the many appearances of Estella, chiefly as a young woman: seven of the twenty-eight lithographs feature her, and she appears in both the visionary frontispiece Pip fancies he sees Estella's Face in the Fire and the concluding plate, Estella and Pip. Thus, although the Pip-Estella relationship is but one of the many threads of Dickens's 1861 novel, such illustrations as Estella and Pip in Miss Havisham's Garden greatly add to the fraught nature of the romance. Although the narrative voice is acutely aware of the special significance of the ruined garden in their relationship, Pip in this illustration is curiously abstracted, lost in thought, as if both dwelling on their past and pondering their future. Furniss suggests Pip and Estella's intimacy (although the dejected Pip seems scarcely aware of Estella's condescending to reengage his attention) by the peremptory way in which she lightly touches his shoulder as she lifts the hem of her skirt to avoid soiling it. In contrast to the slender, youthful couple in elegant mid-century fashions, Furniss presents the garden as a chaotic wilderness which is engulfing Satis House in the backdrop.
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______. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
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______. 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 20 October 2021