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Old Orlick
Sol Eytinge, Junior
1898
approximately 10 cm high by 7.5 cm wide, 4 by inches (framed)
Wood-engraving
Ninth illustration for Great Expectations in the Gadshill Edition.
[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Now, Joe kept a journeyman at weekly wages whose name was Orlick. He pretended that his Christian name was Dolge — a clear impossibility — but he was a fellow of that obstinate disposition that I believe him to have been the prey of no delusion in this particular, but wilfully to have imposed that name upon the village as an affront to its understanding. He was a broadshouldered loose-limbed swarthy fellow of great strength, never in a hurry, and always slouching. He never even seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner, or went away at night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew, as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper's out on the marshes, and on working days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in his pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round his neck and dangling on his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day on the sluice-gates, or stood against ricks and barns. He always slouched, locomotively, with his eyes on the ground; and, when accosted or otherwise required to raise them, he looked up in a half resentful, half puzzled way, as though the only thought he ever had, was, that it was rather an odd and injurious fact that he should never be thinking.
This morose journeyman had no liking for me. When I was very small and timid, he gave me to understand that the Devil lived in a black corner of the forge, and that he knew the fiend very well: also that it was necessary to make up the fire, once in seven years, with a live boy, and that I might consider myself fuel. When I became Joe's 'prentice, Orlick was perhaps confirmed in some suspicion that I should displace him; howbeit, he liked me still less. Not that he ever said anything, or did anything, openly importing hostility; I only noticed that he always beat his sparks in my direction, and that whenever I sang Old Clem, he came in out of time.
Dolge Orlick was at work and present, next day, when I reminded Joe of my half-holiday. He said nothing at the moment, for he and Joe had just got a piece of hot iron between them, and I was at the bellows; but by-and-by he said, leaning on his hammer:
"Now, master! Sure you're not a-going to favour only one of us. If Young Pip has a half-holiday, do as much for Old Orlick." I suppose he was about five-and-twenty, but he usually spoke of himself as an ancient person. [Chapter Fifteen]
Harper's staff illustrator in the 1860-61 serialisation, John McLenan, had dramatised the surly Orlick's hectoring meanness and intimidation in "Hulloa!" he growled; "Where are you two going?" (2 February 1861). Eytinge clearly did not adopt such an interpretation of Dolge Orlick as a burly western desperado, and more plausibly realises him instead as worker in the forge, his vocational milieu. Eytinge gives him a besmirched apron and a huge sledge-hammer, as well as a menacing look and enormous biceps. He is a force to be reckoned with, and the illustration prepares readers for his role as Pip's antagonist later in the limekiln on the marshes. The logical incident with which to introduce the antagonist is Dickens's description of the uncouth giant bested in the wrestling match in the forge. After the journeyman had insulted Mrs. Joe, Joe and Orlick had come to blows — the very scene which young Marcus Stone used to introduce a boyish, cowering Orlick in the Illustrated Library Edition's Old Orlick among the Cinders. Stone, presumably with Dickens's imprimatur, had dramatized Orlick and Joe as a pair of Titans. But in that wood-engraving Herculean Joe is dominant, and Orlick lies vanquished on the ground. Here, in contrast to Stone's "Clash of the Titans," Eytinge effectively suggests Orlick's neanderthal's force, his Satanic malice, and above all his smouldering resentment.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vol. V (2 February 1861): 69.
Dickens, Charles. ("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.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. The Illustrated Library edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1862.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
Created 24 June 2012
Last modified 16 December 2021