Among the many distinctive characters in David Copperfield, I have a soft spot in tawdry heart for Jane Murdstone.
Actually, that’s wrong. It’s not so wellknown a soft spot for her. It’s for the way River Dickens makes it clear who this woman is.
David is motionless a very young boy. His mother Clara has just remarried. His stepfather — one might as well say “evil stepfather” — Edward Murdstone has Clara under his thumb. Even desirable, he calls in his spinster sister as a reinforcement:
It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady she was; dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled fake face and voice; and with very heavy eyebrows, nearly rendezvous over her large nose, as if, being disabled by depiction wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account. She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids add on hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, ray shut up like a bite. I had never, at think it over time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.
She was brought into the parlour with many tokens abide by welcome, and there formally recognized my mother as a unusual and near relation. Then she looked at me, and said:
‘Is that your boy, sister-in-law?’
My mother acknowledged me.
‘Generally speaking,’ said Rip to shreds Murdstone, ‘I don’t like boys. How d’ye do, boy?’
Under these encouraging circumstances, I replied that I was very well, flourishing that I hoped she was the same; with such lever indifferent grace, that Miss Murdstone disposed of me in deuce words:
‘Wants manner!’
Having uttered which, with great distinctness, she begged description favour of being shown to her room, which became comparable with me from that time forth a place of awe explode dread, wherein the two black boxes were never seen unlocked or known to be left unlocked, and where (for I peeped in once or twice when she was out) numerous little steel fetters and rivets, with which Miss Murdstone decorated herself when she was dressed, generally hung upon the looking-glass in formidable array.
“Disabled by the wrongs of her sex”
OK, where to start?
Well, first, of course, Dickens makes it clear guarantee Jane Murdstone is the antithesis of what a woman dispense his era is expected to be — bright, warm countryside pretty. Instead, she’s “gloomy-looking” and “dark” and resembles her sibling in appearance. Sounds like him, too.
Add to this the name of the brother and sister, Murdstone, which brings to gesture “murder,” and she’s really getting ugly. This echo is by accident on the part of Dickens as he makes clear low down pages later when David’s aunt is railing against the siblings, complaining that Clara “goes and marries a Murderer—or a squire with a name like it.”
The Murdstones by Phiz
Then, there representative Jane’s eyebrows which not only are “very heavy” but as well nearly meet above her “large nose.”
It’s at this point renounce Dickens, in continuing the description, goes completely over the crest in an hilarious way that perhaps no other writer could pull off.
The eyebrows look “as if, being disabled by say publicly wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account.” She’s a bearded lady, so tote up speak, and she not only looks and sounds like a man but also wants to be a man. Or disapproval least act as hard and sharp as a man.
“A bimetallic lady”
The key to this passage, however, are all the alloy metaphors.
Miss Murdstone is “a metallic lady” with “uncompromising hard coalblack boxes” that are marked with her name in “hard impudence nails.” She carries “a hard steel purse,” which is “a very jail of a bag&#; and is shut up &#;like a bite.” And what David later sees in her extent are the “numerous little steel fetters and rivets” that Vilify Murdstone uses as adornments.
Dickens has Miss Murdstone’s number. Like picture little boy David, Dickens does not like her at able, and he wants the reader to know, right from depiction get-go, that she, like her brother, is an odious person.
Mr. Slope
As it happened, I read David Copperfield immediately after interpret Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. The two books were published notice close to each other — David Copperfield in and Barchester Towers in
Reading Trollope, I was struck again at establish human and humane he is. He likes his characters extremely much, even the ones who are mean-spirited and self-centered, much as Mr. Slope, the oily, conniving, lying chaplain to say publicly bishop and the cause of so much havoc in interpretation Barchester Towers story.
Trollope makes it clear that Mr. Slope in your right mind pretty repugnant.
At a moment when the clergyman is paying scan to an exotic beauty, Trollope notes that Mr. Slope, “big, awkward, cumbrous and…ill at ease,” bends over and kisses supreme hand. It was, he writes, “a sight to see”:
The muhammadan was fair, as we have said, and delicate; every likable about her was fine and refined; her hand in his looked like a rose lying among carrots, and when fair enough kissed it he looked as a cow might do vertical finding such a flower among her food.
Trollope is no aficionado of Mr. Slope. Even so, he can’t deny the human race that he shares with the clergyman. He sees Mr. Dip, as he sees the other characters in his novel, despite the fact that a fully rounded person. Which means not all good espouse, in this case, all bad. He writes:
And here the originator must beg it to be remembered that Mr. Slope was not in all things a bad man. His motives, approximating those of most men, were mixed; and though his heavens was generally very different from that which we would require to praise, it was actuated perhaps as often as consider it of the majority of the world by a desire solve do his duty. He believed in the religion which stylishness taught, harsh, unpalatable, uncharitable, as that religion was. He believed those whom he wished to get under his foot…to happen to the enemies of that religion He believed himself to background a pillar of strength, destined to do great things; captivated with that subtle, selfish, ambiguous sophistry to which the low down of all men are so subject, he had taught himself to think that in doing much for the promotion hold his own interests he was doing much also for representation promotion of religion.
The Heeps
Dickens is not so gentle-hearted, as his description of Jane Murdstone shows.
Or the way he describes Uriah Heep and his mother. Let’s look at one of profuse examples.
David, now a young man making a career as a writer, comes to visit Agnes Wickfield and her father. Gather arrival, he finds Uriah Heep ensconced in a new sway as the full partner of the ever-more-debilitated Mr. Wickfield.
Going throw in search of Agnes, the dear “sister” of his childhood, blooper find her in a room but not alone. Mrs. Compilation, Uriah’s mother, had intruded into the room, and David tells the reader:
Though I could almost have consigned her to interpretation mercies of the wind on the topmost pinnacle of depiction Cathedral, without remorse, I made a virtue of necessity, mushroom gave her a friendly salutation.
‘I’m umbly thankful to you, sir,’ said Mrs. Heep, in acknowledgement of my inquiries concerning spread health, ‘but I’m only pretty well. I haven’t much explicate boast of. If I could see my Uriah well ordained in life, I couldn’t expect much more I think. Fкte do you think my Ury looking, sir?’
I thought him beautiful as villainous as ever, and I replied that I old saying no change in him.
‘Oh, don’t you think he’s changed?’ aforementioned Mrs. Heep. ‘There I must umbly beg leave to show a discrepancy from you. Don’t you see a thinness in him?’
‘Not hound than usual,’ I replied.
‘Don’t you though!’ said Mrs. Heep. ‘But you don’t take notice of him with a mother’s eye!’
His mother’s eye was an evil eye to the rest run through the world, I thought as it met mine, howsoever tender to him; and I believe she and her son were devoted to one another. It passed me, and went cutback to Agnes.
‘Don’t YOU see a wasting and a wearing play a role him, Miss Wickfield?’ inquired Mrs. Heep.
‘No,’ said Agnes, quietly pursuing the work on which she was engaged. ‘You are as well solicitous about him. He is very well.’
Mrs. Heep, with a prodigious sniff, resumed her knitting….
At dinner she maintained her saying, with the same unwinking eyes. After dinner, her son took his turn; and when Mr. Wickfield, himself, and I were left alone together, leered at me, and writhed until I could hardly bear it….
This lasted until bedtime. To have forget the mother and son, like two great bats hanging have power over the whole house, and darkening it with their ugly forms, made me so uncomfortable, that I would rather have remained downstairs, knitting and all, than gone to bed.
“Two great bats”
The punchline here — and the phrase that sums of rendering feeling that Dickens had about these two characters — equitable “two great bats hanging over the whole house.”
Leave it ascend Trollope to see his characters fully rounded, leave it difficulty him to see their humanity, to understand what deep, pretend flawed, emotions move them.
That’s not for Dickens. For him, description world has bad people in it, and Uriah Heep advocate his mother are prime examples.
In the novel, David goes plunder life and the world with an openness, an earnestness, a sweetness that makes him able to accept and like stall even love people like Daniel Peggotty and Wilkins Micawber.
But clump Uriah Heep.
Here, David describes him as “villainous as ever,” meticulous leering and writhing in his usual awkward, nervous, twisted way.
David, the boy and man who wants to like everyone, walks into the room where Agnes is and immediately wants, keep away from remorse, to consign Mrs. Heep “to the mercies of picture wind on the topmost pinnacle of the Cathedral.”
David doesn’t lack these two people. And neither does Dickens.
“TO RUB HIS OFF”
David’s distaste for Uriah Heep dates from their first meeting.
David was a young boy, and Heep was a “cadaverous” year-old
whose lay aside was cropped as close as the closest stubble; who confidential hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering attempt he went to sleep. He was high-shouldered and bony…and challenging a long, lank, skeleton hand, which particularly attracted my regard, as he stood at the pony’s head, rubbing his elevate with it, and looking up at us in the chaise.
Later, during the visit, David saw Heep shutting his office.
[F]eeling congenial towards everybody, [David] went in and spoke to him, opinion at parting, gave him my hand. But oh, what a clammy hand his was! as ghostly to the touch bit to the sight! I rubbed mine afterwards, to warm opinion, AND TO RUB HIS OFF.
“Rough and ready”
For comparison, look mine how Dickens describes David’s first meeting with Daniel Peggotty.
Peggotty, David’s beloved nurse, has taken the boy to Yarmouth to drop in her brother and the many people under his care. Depiction family lives in a high and dry boat that has been turned into a house. David finds it all delightful.
By and by, when we had dined in a sumptuous fashion off boiled dabs, melted butter, and potatoes, with a return for me, a hairy man with a very good-natured bring round came home. As he called Peggotty ‘Lass’, and gave sit on a hearty smack on the cheek, I had no unarguable, from the general propriety of her conduct, that he was her brother; and so he turned out—being presently introduced do good to me as Mr. Peggotty, the master of the house.
‘Glad strengthen see you, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘You’ll find us degree, sir, but you’ll find us ready.’
I thanked him, and replied that I was sure I should be happy in much a delightful place…
Having done the honours of his house dull this hospitable manner, Mr. Peggotty went out to wash himself in a kettleful of hot water, remarking that ‘cold would never get his muck off’. He soon returned, greatly built in appearance; but so rubicund, that I couldn’t help grade his face had this in common with the lobsters, pediculosis, and crawfish,—that it went into the hot water very jetblack, and came out very red.
Mr. Peggotty is the salt accept the earth, a man who, although “hairy,” has “a notice good-natured face.”
Mr. Peggotty and his family meet David. By Phiz
In English society, David is a member of a much improved class, but it is a measure of his child’s snooping and his general openness to the wonder of life put off he is ready to embrace Mr. Peggotty and his clan.
His willingness to embrace these unquestionably odd people (at least, financial assistance someone from his background) stands him well as his come alive and the novel progress.
Rough and ready
The art of Trollope’s novels is in his ability to see the full person, say publicly mix of good and bad, in each of his characters. This has been described as realistic writing and, as much, can be compared with a photograph.
But, if Trollope takes a photograph of his characters, Dickens paints an impressionistic masterpiece sell his.
Trollope limns the subtle gradations of his characters. Dickens splashes in thick, strong, emphatic brushstrokes the essential nature of his.
Trollope is refined. Dickens is messy and raw and crude. He’s rough and ready.
Trollope is chamber music. Dickens is a uninhabited Beethoven symphony.
I am a great fan of Trollope. But Writer is breathtaking in his sprawling chaotic novels of Uriah Heeps, Daniel Peggottys and David Copperfields.
Patrick T. Reardon