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Orlick . . . very soon among the coal-dust
Charles Green
lithograph
1898
8 x 4.9 inches
Ninth illustration for Great Expectations in the Gadshill Edition.
[These plates have neither captions nor pages, being inserted into the text.]
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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. . . . without so much as pulling off their singed and burnt aprons, they went at one another, like two giants. But, if any man in that neighbourhood could stand up long against Joe, I never saw the man. Orlick, as if he had been of no more account than the pale young gentleman [whom Pip had subdued easily in the ruined garden at Satis House], was very soon among the coal-dust, and in no hurry to come out of it. [Chapter 15]]
Pip has already described Orlick variously as having an "obstinate disposition," as being "Cain," "the Wandering Jew," "morose," and "ill-favoured" earlier in Chapter 15:
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.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Illustrated by Charles Green. Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897-1908. Note: All material is reproduced courtesy of The Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LF.
_____. Great Expectations. Ed. Edward Guiliano and Philip Collins. The Annotated Dickens. 2 vols. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1988. II, 822-1115.
Created 24 April 2004
Last modified 2 March 2020