[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Harry Furniss —> Great Expectations —> Next Plate]
Pip in the Power of Dolge Orlick
Harry Furniss
1910
7.3 x 4.7 inches
"Wolf!" said Orlick, "it was you as did for your shrew sister." "It was you, villain," said I. "I tell you how it was your doing," he retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the stock at the vacant air between us. — p. 405.
Dickens's Great Expectations, Charles Dickens Library Edition, p. 404.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text George P. Landow
“Wolf!” said he, folding his arms again, “Old Orlick’s a-going to tell you somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister.”
Again my mind, with its former inconceivable rapidity, had exhausted the whole subject of the attack upon my sister, her illness, and her death, before his slow and hesitating speech had formed these words.
“It was you, villain,” said I.
“I tell you it was your doing, — I tell you it was done through you,” he retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the stock at the vacant air between us. “I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you to-night. I giv’ it her! I left her for dead, and if there had been a limekiln as nigh her as there is now nigh you, she shouldn’t have come to life again. But it warn’t Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was favoured, and he was bullied and beat. Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh? Now you pays for it. You done it; now you pays for it.”
He drank again, and became more ferocious. I saw by his tilting of the bottle that there was no great quantity left in it. I distinctly understood that he was working himself up with its contents to make an end of me. I knew that every drop it held was a drop of my life. I knew that when I was changed into a part of the vapour that had crept towards me but a little while before, like my own warning ghost, he would do as he had done in my sister’s case, — make all haste to the town, and be seen slouching about there drinking at the alehouses. My rapid mind pursued him to the town, made a picture of the street with him in it, and contrasted its lights and life with the lonely marsh and the white vapour creeping over it, into which I should have dissolved.
It was not only that I could have summed up years and years and years while he said a dozen words, but that what he did say presented pictures to me, and not mere words. In the excited and exalted state of my brain, I could not think of a place without seeing it, or of persons without seeing them. It is impossible to overstate the vividness of these images, and yet I was so intent, all the time, upon him himself, — who would not be intent on the tiger crouching to spring! — that I knew of the slightest action of his fingers.
When he had drunk this second time, he rose from the bench on which he sat, and pushed the table aside. Then, he took up the candle, and, shading it with his murderous hand so as to throw its light on me, stood before me, looking at me and enjoying the sight.
“Wolf, I’ll tell you something more. It was Old Orlick as you tumbled over on your stairs that night.” [Chapter LIII, 405-406]
Furniss has had the benefit of studying F. A. Fraser's rather static realisation of this confrontation of old adversaries in the Household Edition (1876). The late Victorian illustrator adopts a very different strategy: Furniss places Pip, almost a corpse already, trussed up on the ladder and expressionless, to the left, and permits the vengeful, dynamic Orlick to occupy most of the frame. Orlick is a kinetic figure; a wind of powerful emotion seems to blow through him as he raises his shotgun, as if to club his victim to death. The candle gutters, the bottle at his side sways. All seems to be up with the protagonist-narrator, although he must survive to recount the vividly remembered, baroque scene.
Left: F. A. Fraser's version of the scene in the Household Edition: Do you know this?' said he." (1876). Right: H. M. Brock in the Imperial Edition creates suspense with a cunning Orlick's calmly taunting his victim, in "Ah!" he cried . . . "the burnt child dreads the fire!" (1901).
Left: A. A. Dixon's 1905 lithograph of Pip's entrapment by a younger Orlick: "Ah! the burnt child dreads the fire", in the Collins Clear-type Edition. Centre: F. W. Pailthorpe's realisation of the same scene in the Robson and Kerslake Edition (1885): Old Orlick Means Murder. Right: Charles Green's lithograph of a younger Dolge Orlick's taunting the captured Pip: "Do you know this?" said he (1898).
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. Illustrated by John McLenan. [The First American Edition]. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vols. IV: 740 through V: 495 (24 November 1860-3 August 1861).
______. ("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. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. The Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1862. Rpt. in The Nonesuch Dickens, Great Expectations and Hard Times. London: Nonesuch, 1937; Overlook and Worth Presses, 2005.
______. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
______. Great Expectations. Volume 6 of the Household Edition. Illustrated by F. A. Fraser. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.
______. 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 9 October 2021