Then, there are Jane’s eyebrows which not only are “very heavy” but also nearly meet above her “large nose.” This echo is intentional on the part of Dickens as he makes clear some 150 pages later when David’s aunt is railing against the siblings, complaining that Clara “goes and marries a Murderer-or a man with a name like it.” The Murdstones by Phiz Sounds like him, too.Īdd to this the name of the brother and sister, Murdstone, which brings to mind “murder,” and she’s really getting ugly. Instead, she’s “gloomy-looking” and “dark” and resembles her brother in appearance. Well, first, of course, Dickens makes it clear that Jane Murdstone is the antithesis of what a woman of his era is expected to be - bright, warm and pretty. Having uttered which, with great distinctness, she begged the favour of being shown to her room, which became to me from that time forth a place of awe and dread, wherein the two black boxes were never seen open 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 embellished herself when she was dressed, generally hung upon the looking-glass in formidable array. Under these encouraging circumstances, I replied that I was very well, and that I hoped she was the same with such an indifferent grace, that Miss Murdstone disposed of me in two words: ‘Generally speaking,’ said Miss Murdstone, ‘I don’t like boys.

She was brought into the parlour with many tokens of welcome, and there formally recognized my mother as a new and near relation. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was. 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, and shut up like a bite. She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady she was dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled in face and voice and with very heavy eyebrows, nearly meeting over her large nose, as if, being disabled by the wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account. Even so, he calls in his spinster sister as a reinforcement:

His stepfather - one might as well say “evil stepfather” - Edward Murdstone has Clara under his thumb. It’s for the way Charles Dickens makes it clear who this woman is.ĭavid is still a very young boy. Among the many distinctive characters in David Copperfield, I have a soft spot in my heart for Jane Murdstone.Īctually, that’s wrong.

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