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Magwitch and Compeyson in the Booth at Epsom
Harry Furniss
1910
7.4 x 5 inches
"Compeyson, he looks at me very noticing, and I look at him. He has a watch and a chain and a ring and a breast-pin and a handsome suit of clothes. 'To judge from appearances, you're out of luck,' says Compeyson to me." — p. 329.
Dickens's Great Expectations, Library Edition, facing p. 320.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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“At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty years ago, I got acquainted wi’ a man whose skull I’d crack wi’ this poker, like the claw of a lobster, if I’d got it on this hob. His right name was Compeyson; and that’s the man, dear boy, what you see me a pounding in the ditch, according to what you truly told your comrade arter I was gone last night.
“He set up fur a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he’d been to a public boarding-school and had learning. He was a smooth one to talk, and was a dab at the ways of gentlefolks. He was good-looking too. It was the night afore the great race, when I found him on the heath, in a booth that I know’d on. Him and some more was a sitting among the tables when I went in, and the landlord (which had a knowledge of me, and was a sporting one) called him out, and said, ‘I think this is a man that might suit you,’ — meaning I was.
“Compeyson, he looks at me very noticing, and I look at him. He has a watch and a chain and a ring and a breast-pin and a handsome suit of clothes.
“‘To judge from appearances, you’re out of luck,’ says Compeyson to me. [Chapter XLII, 328-329]
Other illustrators prior to Furniss had not realised these reminiscences of Abel Magwitch's relationship with the gentleman-swindler and confidence man Compeyson. Here, then, Furniss operates without precedents as he depicts a young, physically fit Magwitch standing, hands in his pockets, chatting with the lithe and angular criminal whose schemes will prove his downfall. In the background, as figures in a smoke haze (perhaps to suggest that this is a twenty-year-old and distorted memory), Furniss sketches in some masculine members of the racing crowd who are Compeyson's prey. Furniss does not merely give Compeyson a handsome suit of clothes; he gives him a handsome face and speculative expression, in contrast to the blunt-nosed, square headed Magwitch: "he looked at me very noticing" (329) has prompted Furniss's characterization of the cool, calculating youth.
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Paroissien, David. The Companion to "Great Expectations." Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000.
Created 16 February 2007 last updated 17 October 2021