"Joe and Mrs. Joe Gargery" by Sol Eytinge

Joe and Mrs. Joe Gargarey

Sol Eytinge

Wood engraving, approximately 10 cm high by 7.5 cm wide (framed)

Second illustration Dickens's Great Expectations in the single volume A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in the Ticknor & Fields (Boston, 1867) Diamond Edition.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use these images 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.]

In this second full-page dual character study for the second novel in the compact American publication, the belligerent Mrs. Joe, Pip's surviving sibling, scolds her affable husband in the parlour. Although Harper's illustrator John McLenan provided an ample series of forty plates for Eytinge's study, the 1860-61 magazine serialisation offers no precise equivalent for the scene that Eytinge has given us since McLenan does not show the couple together, characteristic as the poses in Eytinge's illustration may be. Much "given to government" (i. e. despotism), Mrs. Joe under Eytinge's hand is an angular, waspish, domineering woman of middle-age (although in the text she is likely in her late twenties only). As in the text, Mrs. Joe is a harridan — "not a good-looking woman" (ch. 2), but as "tall and bony" as Joe is mild and good-natured. Her flaxen-haired husband, the village blacksmith, is a solid, well-built, rotund man — in Eytinge's illustration apparently somewhat younger than his shrewish wife. Seated at the kitchen table, a large mug in his right hand, Joe leans slightly back as his wife in "a coarse apron" upbraids him. Thus, the precise passage illustrated would seem to be this:

By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while against the wall behind him: while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily on.

'Now, perhaps you'll mention what's the matter,' said my sister, out of breath, 'you staring great stuck pig.' [Chapter Two]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use these images 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.]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Il. John McLenan. Vol. IV.

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. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

Last modified 2 October 2011