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"Do you know this?" said he
Charles Green
1898
8 x 4.9 inches
Dickens's Great Expectations, Gadshill Edition, facing 494
[These plates have neither captions nor pages, being inserted into the text]
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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"Why have you lured me here?"
"Don't you know?" said he, with a deadly look.
"Why have you set upon me in the dark?"
"Because I mean to do it all myself. One keeps a secret better than two. O you enemy, you enemy!"
His enjoyment of the spectacle I furnished, as he sat with his arms folded on the table, shaking his head at me and hugging himself, had a malignity in it that made me tremble. As I watched him in silence, he put his hand into the corner at his side, and took up a gun with a brass-bound stock.
"Do you know this?" said he, making as if he would take aim at me. "Do you know where you saw it afore? Speak, wolf!"
"Yes," I answered.
"You cost me that place. You did. Speak!" [Chapter 53]
In the eleventh volume of The Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens (1876) the artist F. A. Fraser provides a plate a composite woodblock-engraving with the identical title, but Green's in the Gadshill Edition of 1898 is more Baroque and less stage-like in composition. Using lithography to create a photographic realism, Green creates a moment of genuine apprehension for the viewer as Orlick (left) seems about to shoot the tied-up Pip (right) in Ch. 53.
The scene seems to accentuate the contrast of shadows in the foreground and the faces of the old adversaries through an emphasis on the candle, just right of centre. Its illumination complements Orlick's resolving for Pip and the reader the mystery of Mrs. Joe's attack much earlier in the novel. Green has made his Orlick far younger and less muscular (see also the fourth plate) in order to render him even visually Pip's double rather than the monster of Gothic tradition that so many other illustrators have envisaged.
Of the elements Dickens describes as being in the room ("a lighted candle on a table, a bench, and a mattress on a truckle bedstead" and the ladder leading to the loft above), the artist has focused on the candle, on Pip's being trussed "tight to the wall" on the "stout perpendicular ladder a few inches from the wall" and on the table that separates the pair. Although from the end visible we judge Orlick's bench a crude piece of furniture suitable to the vengeful and surly ex-journeyman blacksmith, the delicate gate-legged table seems markedly out of place--like the gentlemanly figure of Pip — in the old sluice-house.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Illustrated by John McLenan. Vol. IV. (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.
_____. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.
_____. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Henry Matthew Brock. London: Hodder and Stoughton, n. d. [1916].
_____. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Charles Green. Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1898. Note: All material is reproduced courtesy of The Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LF.
_____. Great Expectations. Volume 19 of the Edition de Grande Luxe. Ed. Richard Garnett. London: Merrill and Baker, 1900.
_____. Great Expectations. "With 28 Original Plates by Harry Furniss." Volume 14 of the Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Co., 1910. Note: All material except the title-page vignettes "Characters in the Story" is reproduced courtesy of The Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LF
_____. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Henry Matthew Brock. London: Hodder and Stoughton, n. d. [1916].
_____. Great Expectations. Ed. Edward Guiliano and Philip Collins. The Annotated Dickens. 2 vols. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1988. II, 822-1115./p>
Created 24 April 2004
Last modified 29 February 2020