Mr. Murdstone by J. Clayton Clarke (“Kyd”) for the watercolour series (1910): reproduced on John Player cigarette card no. 37: Ninety-two Characters from Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop. 2 ½ inches high by 1 ¼ inches wide (6.3 cm high by 3.3 cm wide). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
MR. MURDSTONE. (David Copperfield.)
Sombre, threatening, gloomy, the figure of Mr. Murdstone throws a dark shadow across the earlier chapters of “Copperfield.” His cold, calculated brutality towards the unhappy child place within his power, and the gradual breaking of the gentle mother’s heart, are themes which, in the sensitive reader’s mind, create actual pain. [Verso of Card No. 36]
Passage Suggested by the Illustration: David's Early Recollection of His Stepfather
David's recollection of his aunt's interviewing the Murdstones about custody of David: The momentous interview by Phiz for the September 1849 number (Ch. XIV).
One autumn morning I was with my mother in the front garden, when Mr. Murdstone — I knew him by that name now — came by, on horseback. He reined up his horse to salute my mother, and said he was going to Lowestoft to see some friends who were there with a yacht, and merrily proposed to take me on the saddle before him if I would like the ride.
The air was so clear and pleasant, and the horse seemed to like the idea of the ride so much himself, as he stood snorting and pawing at the garden-gate, that I had a great desire to go. So I was sent upstairs to Peggotty to be made spruce; and in the meantime Mr. Murdstone dismounted, and, with his horse’s bridle drawn over his arm, walked slowly up and down on the outer side of the sweetbriar fence, while my mother walked slowly up and down on the inner to keep him company. I recollect Peggotty and I peeping out at them from my little window; I recollect how closely they seemed to be examining the sweetbriar between them, as they strolled along; and how, from being in a perfectly angelic temper, Peggotty turned cross in a moment, and brushed my hair the wrong way, excessively hard.
Mr. Murdstone and I were soon off, and trotting along on the green turf by the side of the road. He held me quite easily with one arm, and I don’t think I was restless usually; but I could not make up my mind to sit in front of him without turning my head sometimes, and looking up in his face. He had that kind of shallow black eye — I want a better word to express an eye that has no depth in it to be looked into — which, when it is abstracted, seems from some peculiarity of light to be disfigured, for a moment at a time, by a cast. Several times when I glanced at him, I observed that appearance with a sort of awe, and wondered what he was thinking about so closely. His hair and whiskers were blacker and thicker, looked at so near, than even I had given them credit for being. A squareness about the lower part of his face, and the dotted indication of the strong black beard he shaved close every day, reminded me of the wax-work that had travelled into our neighbourhood some half-a-year before. This, his regular eyebrows, and the rich white, and black, and brown, of his complexion — confound his complexion, and his memory! — made me think him, in spite of my misgivings, a very handsome man. I have no doubt that my poor dear mother thought him so too. [Household Edition, Chapter II, "I Observe," 12]
Commentary: Kyd's Debts to Phiz and Barnard
In Kyd's sequence of fifty cards, fully 13 or over 25% concern a single novel, The Pickwick Papers, attesting to the enduring popularity of the picaresque comic novel and also suggesting that the later, darker novels such as Our Mutual Friend (two characters) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (no characters depicted) offered little for the caricaturist, the only late characters in the series being the singularly unpleasant and physically odd Silas Wegg and the rough waterman Rogue Riderhood from Our Mutual Friend, and Turveydrop, Jo, Bucket, and Chadband from Bleak House. The series, however, includes a total of of six character cards from the cast of David Copperfield (May 1849 through November 1850), or 12% of the total: the affable master of English rhetoric Wilkens Micawber, no. 41; the oppressed child who becomes a novelist, David Copperfield, no. 39; the rigid and mean-spirited stepfather, Mr. Murdstone, no. 37; the crotchety but warm-hearted independent woman of property Betsey Trotwood, no. 36; the devious, unctuous clerk Uriah Heep, no. 38; and the stalwart pater familias Dan' Peggotty, no. 40 — characterisations generally based on the original serial illustrations of Dickens's regular visual interpreter in the 1840s, Phiz, who produced forty steel-engravings and the wrapper design for the Bradbury and Evans nineteen-month serial, as well as a wood-engraved frontispiece of Little Em'ly and David as children on the Yarmouth sands for the first cheap edition (1858) and two vignettes for the two-volume Library Edition: Little Em'ly and David by the Sea and Mr. Peggotty's Dream Comes True. However, Phiz's "gentleman in church" who turns up for a guardianship conference at Aunt Betsey's cottage owes more in terms of physiognomy to Fred Barnard's Household Edition composite woodblock illustrations than he does to Phiz's serial engravings.
David's sharpest memory of a Murdstone interrogation according to Fred Barnard in the Household Edition: And when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses (canes he made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying (Ch. IV).
Kyd's model for the evil stepfather in David's modern fairy tale was likely Phiz's study of the cruel brother and sister confronting David's kindly but resolute aunt in her study at Dover in The momentous interview (September 1849: Chapter 14). However, Kyd had one other Phiz model from which to realise David's stoney stepfather, notably in Our Pew at Church (May 1849: Chapter 2), in which the gentleman (down left) with the mutton-chop sideburns (Murdstone) is studying the beautiful young widow, David's mother. The fin-de-siecle illustrator may also have studied the cruel Mr. Murdstone in the wood-engravings of Fred Barnard for the Household Edition volume 3 (1872), particularly the half-page wood engraving depicting David's mother crying as her new husband forcibly imposes algebraic conundrums upon her son, And when we came at last to the five thousand cheeses (canes he made it that day, I remember), my mother burst out crying (Chapter IV, "I Fall into Disgrace"). In all likelihood, as a British artist Kyd never saw an 1867 Diamond Edition volume of the novel, and therefore was not influenced by Sol Eytinge, Junior's Mr. and Miss Murdstone and Mrs. Copperfield, whose image of Edward Murdstone is consistent with Phiz's original conception and Barnard's revision — which, significantly, includes the dour stepfather flexing his cane as David stumbles over the arithmetic problem. It is entirely possible that both Barnard and Kyd were influenced by Luke Fildes's conception of the villainous John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1869-70) based on images of popular critic and poet Matthew Arnold, particularly in Jasper's Sacrifices, in which a John Jasper with mutton-chop sideburns accosts Rosa in the garden of the Nuns' House in Cloisterham (Rochester, Kent).
Relevant Illustrated Editions of this Novel (1849 through 1910)
- David Copperfield (homepage)
- Phiz's 40 serial illustrations for David Copperfield (May 1849 - November 1850)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 1, 1863)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 2, 1863)
- Sir John Gilbert's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 3, 1863)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 4, 1863)
- Sol Eytinge, Junior's 16 wood engravings for the Diamond Edition (1867)
- Fred Barnard's 62 Composite Woodblock Engravings for the Household Edition (1872)
- W. H. C. Groome's seven lithographs for the Collins Clear-type Pocket Edition (1907)
- Harry Furniss's Twenty-nine lithographs for the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910).
Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use the images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned them and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1988.
The Characters of Charles Dickens Pourtrayed in a Series of Original Water Colour Sketches by “Kyd.” London, Paris, and New York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, 1898[?].
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. The Personal Experience and History of David Copperfield. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman and Hall, 1851.
_______. David Copperfield. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The Centenary Edition. 2 vols. London and New York: Chapman & Hall, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911.
_______. The Personal Experience and History of David Copperfield. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1863.
_______. David Copperfield. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr, and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. IV.
_______. David Copperfield, with 61 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition, 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. Volume XV.
_______. David Copperfield. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 10.
Hammerton, J. A. "Ch. XVII. David Copperfield." The Dickens Picture-Book. London: Educational Book Co., [1910], 339-438.
Kyd. Characters from Dickens. Nottingham: John Player & Sons, 1910.
Steig, Michael. Chapter 5. "David Copperfield: Progress of a Confused Soul." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 113-130.
Created 14 January 2015
Last modified 21 July 2025