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In The Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens (1870s) the artist F. A. Fraser provides a plate with the identical caption, but Green's in the Gadshill Edition of 1898 is more Baroque and less stage-like in composition, creating 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.

References

The Annotated Dickens. Ed. Edward Guiliano and Phillip Collins. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986. Vol. 2.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897-1908.

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Last modified 24 April 2004