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“Ah! the burnt child dreads the fire.”
A. A. Dixon
1905
Lithographic reproduction of watercolour
12.5 cm high by 8.2 cm wide (5 inches by 3 ¼ inches)
“Ah! the burnt child dreads the fire.” — seventh illustration in the Collins Pocket Edition (1905), facing p. 512.
[Click on the image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
"You with a uncle too! Why, I know’d you at Gargery’s when you was so small a wolf that I could have took your weazen betwixt this finger and thumb and chucked you away dead (as I'd thoughts o' doing, odd times, when I see you loitering amongst the pollards on a Sunday), and you hadn’t found no uncles then. No, not you! But when Old Orlick come for to hear that your uncle Provis had mostlike wore the leg-iron wot Old Orlick had picked up, filed asunder, on these meshes ever so many year ago, and wot he kep by him till he dropped your sister with it, like a bullock, as he means to drop you — hey? — when he come for to hear that — hey? —"
In his savage taunting, he flared the candle so close at me, that I turned my face aside, to save it from the flame.
"Ah!" he cried, laughing, after doing it again, "the burnt child dreads the fire! Old Orlick knowed you was burnt, Old Orlick knowed you was smuggling your uncle Provis away, Old Orlick's a match for you and know'd you'd come to-night! Now I'll tell you something more, wolf, and this ends it. There's them that's as good a match for your uncle Provis as Old Orlick has been for you. Let him 'ware them, when he's lost his nevvy! Let him 'ware them, when no man can't find a rag of his dear relation's clothes, nor yet a bone of his body. There’s them that can't and that won't have Magwitch — yes, I know the name! — alive in the same land with them, and that's had such sure information of him when he was alive in another land, as that he couldn't and shouldn't leave it unbeknown and put them in danger. P'raps it's them that writes fifty hands, and that's not like sneaking you as writes but one. 'Ware Compeyson, Magwitch, and the gallows!"
He flared the candle at me again, smoking my face and hair, and for an instant blinding me, and turned his powerful back as he replaced the light on the table. I had thought a prayer, and had been with Joe and Biddy and Herbert, before he turned towards me again. [Chapter Fifty-three, pp. 507-508]
In the manner of a stage melodrama of the period, the protagonist is in peril, and his persecutor is a sadist whose outward deformity signals his psychologically disturbed state. Improbably, Pip's attacker, "Old Orlick," is in league with the criminal mastermind, the gentlemanly Compeyson, and knows that Pip has been harbouring the illegally returned felon, Able Magwitch (alias "Provis").
The interior scene is set in a suitably melancholy locale, the old lime-kiln on the marshes — but, since this is a first-person narrative, the reader need not be too apprehensive about Pip's safety, for Dickens is sure to apply the deus-ex-machina principle and see that Herbert and Trabb's boy rescue Pip in the nick of time. The illustrator who had dealt most effectively with this highly charged moment prior to the publication of the Collins Pocket Edition was F. A. Fraser in the Household Edition illustration "Do you know this?" said he (1876), although Furniss's energetic rendering five years after Dixon's is preferable in that it communicates more effectively Orlick's smouldering resentment. Both early twentieth-century illustrators had further precedent than Fraser, however, for the scene in the shanty by the lime-kiln on the Hoo peninsula.
Among the illustrated folio sheets of Harper's Weekly in serialization for 2 February 1861, and subsequently in various illustrated editions, including the Chapman and Hall 1862, 1864, and 1868 volumes with wood-engravings by Marcus Stone, readers of the novel during the nineteenth century would have encountered images of the villainous Orlick, often regarded as Pip's psychological double, despite his physical deformity. Eytinge captures the grim, determined look in the bully's face admirably in his 1867 wood-engraving Old Orlick, producing a malevolent figure with a powerful form consistent with Dickens's text, as opposed to McLenan's bug-eyed western desperado to accosts Pip and Biddy on the marshes. Stone's illustration of Pip's approaching the lonely building on the marshes signifies that something significant will occur, but keeps the reader in suspense about the precise nature of the event.
Moreover, the Stone illustration has the added advantage of communicating a sense of place, as Pip's appointment at the lime-kiln brings him back to the Gravesend region. He leaves the inn that had been "a part of an anient ecclesiastical house" (based on the Mitre Hotel in Chatham) in chapter 52, and walks five miles to the sluice-house by the limekiln in the Hoo peninsula, about three miles from his former village. Other illustrators of the scene have focussed on the interior, and in particular on the figure of Orlick, seen in Stone's series in Old Orlick Among the Cinders much earlier in the story, in chapter 15. Undoubtedly Dickens felt that the vague apprehension that Marcus Stone's atmospheric On the Marshes, by the Lime-Kiln creates in the reader would reinforce the primacy of the text, and therefore he might have disapproved of illustrations such as Dixon's which telegraph the precise nature of the threat to the protagonist.
Perhaps the illustrations that come closest to Dixon's composition are those in Charles Green's "Do you know this?" said he and H. M. Brock's illustration of the same scene, "'Ah!' he cried . . . 'the burnt child dreads the fire'.". Dixon's treatment of his subject is again more psychological and realistic than that of his predecessors as he conveys Pip's fear and Orlick's intense resentment of the young swell who was once his fellow apprentice, and who has been responsible for his loss of place at Satis House. Moreover, Dixon's treatment of Orlick is far more naturalistic and less caricatured than that of previous illustrators. Like Fraser's Orlick, Dixon's is armed with a short rifle, but (unlike Pailthorpe's caricature) he is no monster physically, so that Dixon's interpretation of Pip's captor is similar to that of H. M. Brock, although his Orlick seems to be enjoying the plight of his captive far more than Dixon's.
Studying Dixon's image closely and comparing to it to the text, one appreciates the illustrator's eye for detail such as the ladder, the flaring candle, the brass-bound stock of the carbine, and Pip's bandaged arm. Dixon realises, too, the difference in their postures and dress, and the look of interrogation on Orlick's face. Most important, Dixon brings their faces into close juxtaposition to create a tension that is largely lacking in earlier representations of the scene, with deep shadows behind Pip's bound form throwing into sharp relief his white bandage and pallid face. Moreover, we must read the picture analeptically, as it is situated in the text some four pages after the dialogue, when Pip has been rescued and Herbert reluctantly agrees that their concern for the safety of Provis must be weighed as greater than their desire to have the authorities pursue the hideous malefactor, much stigmatised in such illustrations as Pailthorpe's Old Orlick Means Murder. If he is indeed "Pip's double," Orlick should not be so much older than Pip, despite his cognomen "Old," although as a journeyman he has certainly passed his apprenticeship, and is younger than his master, Joe (born in 1775, and therefore about thirty-six years of age when he contends with Orlick in the forge in Stone's Old Orlick among the Cinders in chapter 15 (which Paroissien dates to 1811), when Pip is about fourteen, a suitable age for apprenticeship in a trade. Green probably errs when he shows an Orlick who appears to be no older than Pip, so that Dixon's Orlick would seem to be about the right age — a well-built but by no means physically deformed workman in his thirties.
Left: John Mclenan's "Hulloa!" he growled; "Where are you two going?" (1861). Right: Marcus Stone's On the Marshes, by the Lime-Kiln (1862). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Left: Sol Eytinge's "Old Orlick" (1867). Centre: F. A. Fraser's "'Do you know this?' said he." (1876). Centre: F. A. Fraser's version of Orlick's taunting Pip: "Do you know this?" said he (1876) Right: F. W. Pailthorpe's "Old Orlick Means Murder" (1885).
Left: Charles Green's "Do you know this?" said he. (1897). Centre: H. M. Brock's "Ah!" he cried . . . "the burnt child dreads the fire" (1902). Right: Harry Furniss's Pip in the Power of Dolge Orlick (1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization 4 (8 December 1860): 773.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley. Volume 1. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by John McLenan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1861.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. The Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1864.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. Vol. XIII.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser. Volume 6 of the Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by F. W. Pailthorpe. London: Robson & Kerslake, 23 Coventry Street, Haymarket, 1885.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Charles Green. Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by H. M. Brock. Imperial Edition. 16 vols. London: Gresham Publishing Company [34 Southampton Street, The Strand, London], 1901-3.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. Collins Pocket Edition. London and Glasgow: Collins' Clear-Type Press, 1905.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol 14.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Heritage Edition. New York: Heritage Press, 1939.
Created 24 February 2014
Last updated 20 August 2026