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"This chap murdered his master."
John McLenan
11.5 cm by 11.5 cm wide (4 ½ inches square)
Dickens's Great Expectations,
Harper's Weekly V (9 March 1861): 149.
Plate 17 (facing p. 120) in the T. B. Peterson single-volume edition of 1861.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick led me into my guardian’s room, and said, “This you’ve seen already.”
“Pray,” said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight again, “whose likenesses are those?”
“These?” said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible heads before bringing them down. “These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a world of credit. This chap (why you must have come down in the night and been peeping into the inkstand, to get this blot upon your eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered his master, and, considering that he wasn’t brought up to evidence, didn’t plan it badly.”
“Is it like him?” I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick spat upon his eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.
“Like him? It’s himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate, directly after he was taken down. You had a particular fancy for me, hadn’t you, Old Artful?” said Wemmick. He then explained this affectionate apostrophe, by touching his brooch representing the lady and the weeping willow at the tomb with the urn upon it, and saying, “Had it made for me, express!” [Chapter XXIV, 149]The opening scenes in London's Little Britain establish Jaggers's professional connections to the criminal underclass, and therefore prepare readers for the eventual revelations of the identities of Pip's mysterious benefactor and Estella's mother. That these connections are sometimes as much personal as professional is revealed by both Jaggers' death-masks and Wemmick's jewellery.
In McLennan's depiction of the scene in Jaggers' office, Wemmick in a smart clerk's suit holds up the killer's death-mask for Pip to admire, as if there could be anything admirable about a criminal who murdered his own master. Although Wemmick is proud of these macabre souvenirs from Jaggers's early Old Bailey trials, his face betrays little emotion. Pip seems impressed, but not sure how to respond to the masks and what Wemmick is telling him about them. He had come to Little Britain to draw the considerable sum of twenty pounds, but had been curious about these decorations in the private office of his guardian. Although the illustrator has included a sabre and horse-pistol hanging on the wall, Dickens has not mentioned such details and Wemmick says nothing about them.
Left: Pip in Mr. Jaggers's Office (1898), in the Gadshill Edition by Charles Green. Right: In the Household Edition, F. A. Fraser realizes Wemmick's taking down the mask lovingly: "This chap . . . . murdered his master" (1876).
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.
______. Great Expectations. Volume 6 of the Household Edition. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.
Paroissien, David. The Companion to "Great Expectations." Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
Created 20 November 2007 Last updated 19 November 2021