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The sergeant ran in first
Felix O. C. Darley
1861
Photogravure
9.9 high by 8.5 wide cm (4 by 3 ¼ inches) vignetted
Dickens's Great Expectations, Household Edition (1861), vol. 1 frontispiece.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. Image reproduced courtesy of Dickens collector and bibliophile Dan Calinescu, Toronto, Ontario.
The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down, and two of his men ran in close upon him. Their pieces were cocked and levelled when we all ranin.
"Here are both men!" panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom of aditch. "Surrender, you two! and confound you for two wild beasts! Come asunder!"
Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being sworn, andblows were being struck, when some more men went down into the ditch to help thesergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict and the other one. Both were bleedingand panting and execrating and struggling; but of course I knew them both directly.
"Mind!" said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his raggedsleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers: "I took him! I give him up to you! Mind that!"
"It's not much to be particular about," said the sergeant; "it'll do yousmall good, my man, being in the same plight yourself. Handcuffs there!"
"I don't expect it to do me any good. I don't want it to do me more goodthan it does now," said my convict, with a greedy laugh. "I took him. He knows it. That'senough for me."
The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old bruisedleft side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all over. He could not so much asget his breath to speak, until they were both separately handcuffed, but leaned upon asoldier to keep himself from falling. [Chapter V, pp. 50-51]
Here, with only the benefit of McLenan's serial illustrations as points of reference, Darley (then 39 and well established as a professional artist), realised the dramatic moment when the party of soldiers suddenly encounters the two escapees wrestling in the mud of the marshes. The tangle of arms, the expressions on the faces of Magwitch, Pip, and Joe, and the composition of the photogravure plate generally make this a highly effective realisation of a textual moment rarely dealt with by illustrators.
Other illustrators, such as Marcus Stone (1862), have entirely overlooked the escaped convicts, or have focussed instead on Magwitch's dramatic encounter with Pip in the churchyard. An example of the latter is Furniss's illustration Pip's Struggle with the Escaped Convict (see below). In contrast to the central position accorded Pip and his brother-in-law and surrogate parent in the Darley composition, in the Household Edition version of this scene note Fraser's emphasis on the wrestling convicts and the absence of Pip as observer in The sergeant ran in first (see below).
Darley's precision in the depiction of the military uniforms suggests that he may have researched the matter in order to make the illustration convincing historically. The most apt point of comparison for Darley's dynamic handling of the convicts remains, however, McLenan's serial illustration Three soldiers carry away Magwitch in shackles, the uncaptioned headpiecefor the 8 December 1860 issue of Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Darley's 1861 frontispiece for the first volume (in which Pip from Joe's shoulder watches the apprehension of "his" convict), taken in conjunction with the frontispiece for the second volume (the return of Magwitch from Australia fifteen years later), suggests that Darley had read the novel, just concluded in serial, as the story of fathers (and surrogate parents)-and-sons. Neither Darley frontispiece significantly points to the influential females of the story, Mrs. Joe, Biddy, Miss Havisham, and Estella, the latter two appearing prominently in Stone's wood-engravings for the Illustrated Library Edition. Whereas Stone's series, by omitting Magwitch, withholds the plot secret of the source of Pip's expectations, Darley's second frontispiece must have created suspicions in the minds of alert readers who were unfamiliar with the story from the American serialisation earlier that year.
Left: John McLenan's headnote vignette for the 8 Dec. 1860 instalment. Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s "Pip and The Convict". Right: F. A. Fraser's "The sergeant ran in first" . [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Left: F. W. Pailthorpe's "Terrible Stranger in the Churchyard." Centre: H. M. Brock's "I made bold to say 'I am glad you enjoy it'". Right: Harry Furniss's "Pip's Struggle with the Escaped Convict." [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Character Sketches from Dickens. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1888. [Folio of prints]
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization 4 (8 December 1860): 773.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley. Volume 16. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley. Volume 17. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by John McLenan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1861.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. The Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1864.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. XIII.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser. Volume 6 of the Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by F. W. Pailthorpe. London: Robson & Kerslake, 23 Coventry Street, Haymarket, 1885.
_______. Great Expectations. Volume 19 of the Edition de Grande Luxe. Ed. Richard Garnett. London: Merrill and Baker, 1900.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by H. M. Brock. Imperial Edition. 16 vols. London: Gresham Publishing Company [34 Southampton Street, The Strand, London], 1901-3.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. Collins Pocket Edition. London and Glasgow: Collins' Clear-Type Press, 1905.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol 14.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Frederic W. Pailthorpe with 17 hand-tinted water-colour lithographs. The Franklin Library. Franklin Center, Pennsylvania: 1979. Based on the Robson and Kerslake (London) edition, 1885.
_______. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Heritage Edition. New York: Heritage Press, 1939.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. "Picaresque Novel." A Handbook to Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. Pp. 389-390.
Paroissien, David. The Companion to "Great Expectations." Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
Created 24 February 2014 Last updated 18 January 2024