Free Dickens' Women by Miriam Margolyes

Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others.
    â€˜With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon and Spinach!’
    Â 
    The End

    George Edmunds’ Song by Charles Dickens (‘Autumn Leaves’)
    Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here;
    Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
    How like the hopes of childhood’s day,
    Thick clust’ring on the bough!
    How like those hopes in their decay–
    How faded are they now!
    Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here;
    Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
    Wither’d leaves, wither’d leaves, that fly before the gale:
    Withered leaves, withered leaves, ye tell a mournful tale,
    Of love once true, and friends once kind,
    And happy moments fled:
    Dispersed by every breath of wind,
    Forgotten, changed, or dead!
    Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here!
    Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!

The Women in the Boxes
Betsey Trotwood
    My aunt was a tall, hard-featured lady but by no means ill-looking. There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice, in her gait and carriage amply sufficient to account for the effect she had made upon a gentle creature like my mother; but her features were rather handsome than otherwise, though unbending and austere. I particularly noticed that she had a quick, bright eye. Her hair, which was grey, was arranged in two plain divisions, under what I believed would be called a mob-cap; I mean a cap much more common then than now, with side pieces fastening under the chin. Her dress was of a lavender colour, and perfectly neat, but scantily made, as if she desired to be as little encumbered as possible. I remember that I thought it, in form, more like a riding-habit, with the superfluous skirt cut off, than anything else. She wore, at her side, a gentleman’s gold watch, if I might judge from its size and make, with an appropriate chain and seals; she had some linen at her throat not unlike a shirt-collar, and things at her wrists like little shirt-wristbands.
    Dickens’ Women has travelled widely, and played many venues across the world. It was seen in thirteen different places in India. In Visakhapatnam, during a Question and Answer session after the show, a tall, elegant gentleman rose to his feet, smacked his forehead, and demanded to know in an anguished voice, and with great vehemence, ‘Where, oh where is Betsey Trotwood?’ Where indeed? The truth is that Betsey, along with many other much-admired female characters, was stowed away, in a room in Clapham, in a series of cardboard boxes, containing materialthat had been read, relished, and then sadly discarded, because there wasn’t room for her in the evolving script.
    Dickens’ friend, and biographer, John Forster called Betsey ‘a gnarled and knotted piece of female timber sound to the core’.
    It is believed that she was based on Miss Mary Pearson Strong, who lived at Broadstairs, Kent, and who died on 14 January 1855; her former home used to house a Dickens Museum.
    Aunt Betsey Trotwood appears early in the novel which Dickens considered to be his best work, David Copperfield . She arrives at the home of her dead brother’s pretty, gentle, young widow. The sad young woman is heavily pregnant with the eponymous hero, David.
    My father often hinted that she seldom conducted herself like any ordinary Christian; and now, instead of ringing the bell, she came and looked in at the identical window, pressing the end of her nose to that extent, that my poor dear mother used to say that it became flat and white in an instant.
    She gave my mother such a turn, that I have always been convinced that I am indebted to Miss Betsey for having been born on a Friday.
    It has been said of Dickens that he had to