Free Dickens' Women by Miriam Margolyes Page A

make his characters humorous before he could make them real. This is certainly true of Betsey. Initially, even her tragic history is told with a lightness of touch.
    Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor mother always called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread of this formidable personage to mention her at all (which was seldom), had been married to a husband younger than herself, who was very handsome, except in the sense of the homely adage, ‘handsome is, as handsome does,’ – for hewas strongly suspected of having beaten Miss Betsey and even once, on a disputed question of supplies, made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs’ window.
    Determined that the soon-to-be-delivered baby is to be a girl named Betsey Trotwood Copperfield, the formidable aunt terrorises the amiable doctor Mr Chillip (another glorious Dickens name):
    â€˜The baby,’ said my aunt, ‘How is she?’
    â€˜Ma’am,’ returned Mr Chillip ‘I apprehended you had known. It’s a boy.’
    My aunt never said a word, but took her bonnet by the strings, in the manner of a sling, aimed a blow at Mr Chillip’s head with it, put it on bent, and walked out and never came back.
    She does return later in the book. After his young mother’s death in childbirth, David is sent by his unfeeling stepfather to work in a warehouse. Just as in the blacking factory of Dickens’ own childhood, the unfortunate workforce wash and label wine bottles. Dickens dips his pen in his own heart’s blood and, as David, writes:
    I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made a sign on my behalf. But none was made; and I became at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinsby.
    When David runs away from Murdstone and Grinsby he makes his way to Dover, to Aunt Betsey Trotwood.
    Again and again, and a hundred times again, since the night when the thought first occurred to me and banished sleep, I had gone over that old story of my poor mother’s about my birth, which it had been one of my great delights in the old time, to hear tell, and which I knew by heart. My aunt walked into that story, and walked out of it, a dread and awful personage; but there was one little trait in her behaviour which I liked to dwell on, and which gave me some faint shadow of encouragement. I could not forget how my mother had thought that she felt her touch her pretty hair with no ungentle hand; and though it might have been altogether my mother’s fancy, and might have had no foundation whatever, in fact, I made a little picture out of it, of my terrible aunt relenting towards the girlish beauty that I recollected so well and loved so much, which softened the whole narrative. It is very possible that it had been in my mind a long while, and had gradually engendered my determination.
    Rescued from the function of being the ‘terrible aunt’, Betsey becomes that rarity among Dickens’ women, a mature woman who is sensible, kind, wise and genuinely good. She is neither satirised, nor idealised. She is shown to be tactfully helpful to all; to Mr Dick, whom she cares for having saved him from the asylum into which his brother had cast him; and to David, for whom she defies the evil Murdstones and whom she clothes, houses, loves and, most glorious of all, sends to school. She does, however, rename him Trotwood (shortened to Trot), an echo of the female child he failed to be. She is instrumental in saving the Micawbers, and Little Em’ly. Well, she succeeds in sending them to Australia, which was meant