David copperfield dickens biography book review

Among the many distinctive characters in David Copperfield, I have a soft spot in my heart for Jane Murdstone.

Actually, that’s wrong.

It’s not so much a soft spot for her. It’s for the way Charles Dickens makes it clear who this woman is.

David is still a very young boy. His mother Clara has just remarried.

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His stepfather — one might as well say “evil stepfather” — Edward Murdstone has Clara under his thumb. Even so, 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 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.

She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the