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.

David copperfield dickens