D

Dadson, Mr (SB) The writing-master at Minerva House, the Misses Crumpton’s school in Hammersmith. (‘Tales: Sentiment’)

Daisy, Solomon (BR) The parish clerk who frequents the Maypole and who relates at the outset of Barnaby Rudge the story of the murder of Reuben Haredale at the Warren and of the discovery of the supposed body of Rudge, the steward, twenty-two years previously. ‘By dint of relating the story very often, and ornamenting it (according to village report) with a few flourishes suggested by the various hearers from time to time, he had come by degrees to tell it with great effect.’ Five years later, in 1775, on the anniversary of the murders, Daisy bursts into the Maypole in terror, having seen what he takes to be Rudge’s ghost. When the Gordon Riots break out, he and his two cronies, Cobb and Parkes, defy Mr Willet, the landlord of the Maypole, by walking from Chigwell to London to see for themselves what is happening there. (1-3, 11, 30, 33, 54, 56, 82)

Dando (SB) The head boatman at Searle’s yard on the banks of the Thames. (‘Scenes: The River’)

Danton, Mr (SB) A friend of Mr Kitterbell’s. ‘He had acquired, somehow or other, the reputation of being a great wit, and, accordingly, whenever he opened his mouth, everybody who knew him laughed very heartily.’ (‘Tales: The Bloomsbury Christening’)

Darby (BH) A police constable on duty

in Tom-all-Alone’s, who accompanies Inspector Bucket and Mr Snagsby in their investigations in that area. (22)

Darnay, Charles (TTC) He was the nephew of the Marquis St Evrémonde, but he had adopted the name of Darnay, an Anglicised version of D’Aulnay, his mother’s maiden name. He was ‘a young man of about five-and-twenty, wellgrown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark eye. His condition was that of a young gentleman.’ He is tried at the Old Bailey on a false charge of treason, but he is cleared when his remarkable likeness to Sydney Carton is adduced as evidence of the uncertainty of his identity. Darnay detests the aristocratic family and system to which he belongs by birth. In conversation with his uncle, the Marquis, he recalls that ‘we did a world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and our pleasure [including Doctor Manette, although Darnay is unaware of this]’. The consequence is that Darnay, as he says, is ‘bound to a system that is frightful to [him], responsible for it, but powerless in it’. He works in England, where he has sought refuge from the abhorred system, as a French tutor. Having fallen in love with Lucie Manette, he marries her. During the French Revolution, he goes to France, in response to a plea for help from Gabelle, an old servant of the St Evrémonde family, who has been imprisoned. Darnay himself is imprisoned but is released owing to the intervention of Doctor Manette. But he is rearrested, imprisoned again, and condemned to death, because of Doctor

Figure 3 Doctor Manette, little Lucie and Charles and Lucie Darnay by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz)

Manette’s written testimony of the wrongs committed by the St Evrémonde family. He is saved when Sydney Carton, his double, takes his place in the prison cell and allows himself to be executed in Darnay’s place. For the possible significance of his initials, which are the same as Charles Dickens’s, see Doubledick, Richard. (II: 2-4, 6, 9, 10, 16-18, 20, 21, 24; III: 1, 3-13)

Dartle, Rosa (DC) Mrs Steerforth’s companion. She was ‘of a slight short figure, dark, and not agreeable to look at, but with some appearance of good looks too, who attracted my [i.e., David Copperfield’s] attention . . . She had black hair and eager black eyes, and was thin, and had a scar upon her lip. It was an old scar – I should rather call it, seam, for it was not discoloured, and healed years ago – which had once cut through her mouth, downward towards the chin . . . I concluded in my own mind that she was about thirty years of age, and that she wished to be married. She was a little

dilapidated – like a house – with having been so long to let; yet had, as I have said, an appearance of good looks. Her thinness seemed to be the effect of some wasting fire within her, which found a vent in her gaunt eyes.’ David is fascinated by her to the extent that he even finds himself ‘a little in love’ with her. Miss Dartle is a young woman of sarcastic penetration, who indirectly makes her opinions clear by a process of asking for information, as when she asks Steerforth about the Peggotty family and household: ‘That sort of people. Are they really animals or clods, and things of another order? I want to know so much.’ As Steerforth tells David, ‘she brings everything to a grindstone . . . and sharpens it, as she has sharpened her own face and figure these years past. She has worn herself away by constant sharpening. She is all edge.’ When Steerforth was a boy, he was so exasperated by her on one occasion that he threw a hammer at her and it was this that had scarred her lip. Despite that incident, she is passionately in love

with him and therefore rages against him, Emily and Daniel Peggotty when she hears of the elopement: ‘They are a depraved, worthless set. I would have her whipped.’ In a highly melodramatic confrontation with Emily, after the latter’s return to England, she mercilessly excoriates her. She later pitilessly hurls verbal abuse at Mrs Steerforth after Steerforth’s death: ‘My love would have been devoted – would have trod your paltry whimpering under foot!’ Nevertheless, she remains with Mrs Steerforth, by turns caressing her and quarrelling with her. In her torments and frustrations, Miss Dartle can be compared with Miss Wade. A possible model for Miss Dartle is Miss Meredith, who was the companion of Miss Burdett Coutts, one of Dickens’s close acquaintances. (20, 21, 24, 29, 32, 36, 46, 50, 56, 64)

Datchery, Dick (MED) He is a mysterious stranger who appears in Cloisterham. He was ‘a white-haired personage, with black eyebrows. Being buttoned up in a tightish blue surtout, with a buff waistcoat and gray trousers, he had something of a military air. . . This gentleman’s white head was unusually large, and his shock of white hair was unusually thick and ample.’ He lodges with the Topes, is very interested in John Jasper, and questions Princess Puffer and Deputy. Dickens evidently destined Datchery to play an important part in the novel. Commentators are generally agreed that he is a character in disguise – but who? Candidates include Helena or Neville Landless, Bazzard, Grewgious, Tartar, and Edwin Drood himself. (18, 23)

David (NN) The Cheerybles’ ‘ancient butler of apoplectic appearance . . . with very short legs’. (37, 63)

David (OCS) The elderly, deaf gravedigger in the village where Little Nell and her Grandfather find refuge. (54)

Davis, Gill (CS) A private in the Royal Marines, who is the narrator of the events on Silver-Store Island. (‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners’)

Dawes, Mary (LD) The nurse in the poor nobleman’s household where Miss Wade was employed for a time as a governess. Miss Wade typically misinterpreted her benevolent actions as a form of exulting over her. (II: 21)

Dawkins, Jack (OT) The young pickpocket, always called the Artful Dodger, whom Oliver Twist encounters in Barnet, on the road to London. ‘He was a snubnosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man.’ His speech is full of ironical remarks and the vivid slang known as ‘thieves’ cant’, as when he talks to Oliver at their first meeting: ‘But come . . . you want grub, and you shall have it. I’m at low-water-mark myself – only one bob and a magpie; but, as far as it goes, I’ll fork out and stump. Up with you on your pins. There! Now then! Morrice!’ He takes Oliver to Fagin’s den, and it’s the Dodger’s theft of Mr Brownlow’s handkerchief that leads to Oliver’s wrongful arrest. Regarded by Fagin as his ‘best hand’, the Dodger is finally convicted of stealing a silver snuff-box from a gentleman’s pocket, which does not prevent him from treating the court officials with grinning impudence: ‘for this ain’t the shop for justice; besides which, my attorney is abreakfasting this morning with the Wice President of the House of Commons’. (8-10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 25, 39, 43)

Daws, Mary (DS) A ‘young kitchenmaid of inferior rank’ in Mr Dombey’s household. After the failure of Dombey’s firm, she unexpectedly utters the words, ‘Suppose the wages shouldn’t be paid!’ and is consequently rebuked by the Cook. (59)

Dawson, Mr (SB) The surgeon in ‘Our Parish’. As was customary, he ‘displays a large lamp, with a different colour in every pane of glass, at the corner of the row’. (‘Our Parish: The Four Sisters’)

Deaf Gentleman, the (MHC) A dear friend of Master Humphrey’s, who trusts and believes that their attachment ‘will only be interrupted by death, to be renewed in another existence’. (2)

Dean, the (MED) A ‘modest and worthy gentleman’, who is the Dean of Cloisterham Cathedral. (2, 4, 12, 16)

Dedlock, Lady (BH) Honoria Dedlock was the proud and elegant wife of Sir Leicester Dedlock. Although her origins were reputed to be humble, ‘she had beauty, pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense enough to portion out a legion of fine ladies. Wealth and station, added to these, soon floated her upward; and for years, now, my Lady Dedlock has been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence, and at the top of the fashionable tree . . . She has beauty still, and, if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn. She has a fine face – originally of a character that would be rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into classicality by the acquired expression of her fashionable state.’ But her guilty, secret past is gradually uncovered, mostly by her lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, and Mr Guppy: as a young woman, she had a child, Esther Summerson, by her lover, Captain Hawdon. Wrongly denounced in a letter as the murderess of Tulkinghorn and having heard from Guppy that her secrets will be exposed, she takes flight. Her route is traced by Esther and Inspector Bucket, who (with Mr Woodcourt) find her lying dead at the gate of the burial ground where Hawdon was interred. Michael Slater, in Dickens and Women, sees her as Edith Dombey’s successor: ‘the “Bought Bride” [Edith Dombey] is succeeded by the Great Lady

with a Guilty Secret, a figure belonging more to the world of melodrama (Miss Braddon was to give Victorian readers a definitive embodiment of the role in Lady Audley’s Secret ten years later) than the Bought Bride, who was so much closer to contemporary social realities. Yet Lady Dedlock seems, on the whole, less jarringly melodramatic than Edith [partly because of the terser language she speaks]’ (1983: 261). (2, 7, 9, 12, 16, 18, 23, 28, 29, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, 48, 53-59)

Dedlock, Sir Leicester (BH) ‘Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills, but would be done up without Dedlocks . . . Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady [whom he married for love]. He will never see sixtyfive again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet sixty-seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then, and walks a little stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his light grey hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure white waistcoat, and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned.’ Mr Boythorn, his neighbour, angrily exclaims that Sir Leicester and his family ‘are the most solemnly conceited and consummate blockheads!’ In his aristocratic pride, Sir Leicester scorns all social classes below his own and any moves towards democratic parliamentary elections. He considers that the whole country is going to pieces. After the revelations concerning Lady Dedlock’s past and present conduct, he is so shocked that he has a stroke, and becomes ‘invalided, bent, and almost blind, but of worthy presence yet’. He nevertheless asks Volumnia Dedlock, Mrs Rouncewell and George to witness that he asserts no cause of complaint against Lady Dedlock and that he retains an undiminished affection for her. G.K. Chesterton makes

a typically paradoxical comparison between Sir Leicester Dedlock and Harold Skimpole: they ‘are alike in accepting with a royal unconsciousness the anomaly and evil of their position. But the idleness and insolence of the aristocrat is human and humble compared to the idleness and insolence of the artist’ (1933: 158). (2, 7, 9, 12, 16, 18, 27-29, 40, 41, 43, 48, 49, 53-56, 58, 63, 66)

Dedlock, Volumnia (BH) A cousin of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s. She was ‘a young lady (of sixty)’, who has retired to Bath, ‘where she lives slenderly on an annual present from Sir Leicester, and whence she makes occasional resurrections in the country houses of her cousins’. After Lady Dedlock’s death, she remains with Sir Leicester, where she ‘has alighted on a memorandum concerning herself, in the event of “anything happening” to her kinsman, which is handsome compensation for an extensive course of reading, and holds even the dragon Boredom at bay’. (28, 40, 53, 56, 58, 66)

Deedles (CB) A friend of Alderman Cute, he was a banker who put ‘a doublebarrelled pistol to his mouth, in his own counting house . . . and blew his brains out’. (The Chimes)

Defarge, Ernest (TTC) A wine-shop keeper in Paris. He ‘was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty, and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to the elbows. Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own crisplycurling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good bold breadth between them. Goodhumoured-looking on the whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing

down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn the man.’ As Doctor Manette’s former servant, he gives him refuge after his release from the Bastille. Unlike his wife, he becomes discouraged by the apparently slow progress of the revolutionary cause. But when the Revolution comes, he is one of the leaders of the assault on the Bastille (where he retrieves from a chimney Doctor Manette’s written testimony concerning the evil doings of the St Evrémonde family) and is one of the participants in the hanging of Foulon. At Charles Darnay’s second trial, he produces Doctor Manette’s incriminating evidence and thus brings about Darnay’s condemnation. He nevertheless urges Madame Defarge and others to spare Doctor Manette and Lucie out of sympathy for their emotional anguish. (I: 5, 6; II: 7, 15, 16, 21, 22; III: 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14)

Defarge, Madame Thérèse (TTC) The wife of Defarge, the wine-shop keeper. She ‘was a stout woman of about his own age [thirty], with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and a great composure of manner’. She is constantly knitting ‘with the steadfastness of Fate’, keeping thereby a register ‘in her own stitches and her own symbols’. (This is Dickens’s imaginative heightening of the well-known figure of the tricoteuse during the French Revolution.) With even more determination than her husband, she relentlessly prepares, in the pre-revolutionary days, for ‘vengeance and retribution’, however long they may take. In his admiring opinion, she is ‘a great woman . . . a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully grand woman!’ Armed with an axe, she leads the women in the assault on the Bastille and hews off the head of the governor of the prison. She rejoices in the capture and execution of Foulon, clapping her hands ‘as at a play’. She reveals a personal motive for her bloodthirsty

fervour in that she was the sister of the woman and boy killed by the Evrémondes: ‘imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.’ Hunting down Lucie Darnay, her child and Doctor Manette, whom she has resolved must die, she accidentally shoots herself dead in a struggle with Miss Pross. (I: 5, 6; II: 7, 15, 16, 21, 22; III: 3, 5, 6, 8-10, 12, 14)

Delafontaine, Mr (SB) A gentleman who lived in Bedford Square with whom Horatio Sparkins claimed to have exchanged cards. (‘Tales: Horatio Sparkins’)

Dellombra, Signor He ‘was dressed in black, and had a reserved and secret air, and was a dark remarkable-looking man, with black hair and a grey moustache’. He haunts Clara, a young English bride, in dreams and in reality, and is later reported to have made off with her in a carriage. (‘To be Read at Dusk’)

Demple, George (DC) A doctor’s son, who was one of David Copperfield’s fellow-pupils at Salem House. (5, 7)

Denham, Edward (CB) The assumed name of Edmund Longford. (The Haunted Man)

Dennis, Ned (BR) The public hangman, who eagerly becomes one of the ringleaders of the Gordon Riots. He ‘was a squat, thickset personage, with a low retreating forehead, a coarse shock head of hair, and eyes so small and near together, that his broken nose seemed to prevent their meeting and fusing into one of the usual size’. His motive for joining the anti-Catholic movement led by Lord George Gordon is that his work is ‘sound, Protestant, constitutional, English work’. If, he exclaims with grim

relish, ‘these Papists gets into power and begins to boil and roast instead of to hang, what becomes of my work!’ He takes a blackly jocular pride in making cryptic references to his occupation. One of the many people he had previously hanged was Hugh’s mother. But he shows abject cowardice when he himself is arrested, condemned to death and hanged for his prominent part in the Riots. Dickens based him on the actual hangman of the same name, who held the office from 1771 to 1786 and who was active in the Riots. He was, however, reprieved from execution. There were also literary antecedents: ‘the first chapter of Charles Whitehead’s Autobiography of Jack Ketch [1834] and, more generally . . . the irony of [Fielding’s] Jonathan Wild [1743]’ (Tillotson 1954a: xi). (36-40, 44, 49, 50, 52-54, 59, 60, 63-65, 69-71, 74-77)

Deputy (MED) Also known as Winks, he was a ‘hideous small boy’, who, in his own words, was ‘man-servant up at the Travellers’ Twopenny in Gas Works Garding’. Durdles pays him a halfpenny ‘to pelt him home’ if Deputy catches him out late. Deputy chants, ‘like a little savage’, a strange rhyme that begins ‘Widdy widdy wen!’ (5, 12, 18, 23)

Derrick, John (CS) The ‘trusty and attached servant for more than twenty years’ of the narrator of ‘To be Taken with a Grain of Salt’. (‘Doctor Marigold’)

Dibabs, Jane (NN) A former acquaintance of Mrs Nickleby, who cites her as an example of a woman who ‘married a man who was a great deal older than herself’. (55)

Dibble, Mr Sampson and Mrs Dorothy (UT) An aged, blind Mormon emigrant and his wife. (‘Bound for the Great Salt Lake’)

Dick (NN) A ‘stout old Yorkshireman’, who was the guard on the coach that took Mr Squeers and Nicholas Nickleby to Greta Bridge. (5)

Dick (NN) Tim Linkinwater’s blind blackbird, which he kept in the Brothers Cheeryble’s counting-house. ‘There was not a bird of such methodical and business-like habits in all the world, as the blind blackbird, who dreamed and dozed away his days in a large snug cage, and had lost his voice, from old age, years before Tim first bought him.’ Dickens’s daughters had a pet canary named Dick. (37)

Dick (OT) A pathetic, half-starved, little pauper boy, who was a friend of Oliver Twist’s at Mrs Mann’s baby-farm. When Oliver determines to go away and seek his fortune, he bids farewell to Dick, who exclaims, ‘God bless you!’ This was the first blessing that Oliver had received, and ‘through the struggles and sufferings, and troubles and changes, of his after life, he never once forgot it’. At the end of the novel, Oliver learns that Dick has died. (7, 17, 51)

Dick, Mr (DC) The name by which Mr Richard Babley was known. He was an amiable, simple-minded gentleman, who lived with Miss Trotwood, of whom he was a ‘sort of distant connexion’. When David arrives at Miss Trotwood’s house in Dover, he looks at an upstairs window, where he sees ‘a florid, pleasant-looking gentleman, with a grey head, who shut up one eye in a grotesque manner, nodded his head at me several times, shook it at me as often, laughed, and went away’. Mr Dick’s submission to Miss Trotwood and ‘his childish delight when she praised him’ made David suspect that he was ‘a little mad’. According to Miss Trotwood, who shows him great devotion, he was made ill by his sister’s wretched marriage and fear of his brother-in-law. She refuses to acknowledge that he is mentally

defective in any way, and turns to him for advice in practical matters. When she asks him what should be done with David, who has so unexpectedly arrived from London, he immediately replies, ‘I should put him to bed’, which gives her a feeling of ‘complacent triumph’ in his good judgement. Mr Dick is perpetually engaged in writing a Memorial for the legal authorities but can never keep out of it his obsession with King Charles I (hence, the phrase ‘King Charles’s head’). One of his pleasures is flying a great kite made out of old leaves of the Memorial. Having always venerated Dr Strong, he becomes a sympathetic link between him and Annie, helping to bring about a full understanding between them. Dickens’s presentation of Mr Dick, and the relationship between him and Aunt Betsey, is markedly sympathetic and forward-looking, as John Forster pointed out: ‘By a line thrown out in Wilhelm Meister, that the true way of treating the insane, was, in all respects possible, to act to them as if they were sane, Goethe anticipated what it took a century to apply to the most terrible disorder of humanity; and what Mrs [sic] Trotwood does for Mr Dick goes a step further, by showing how often asylums might be dispensed with, and how large might be the number of deficient intellects manageable with patience in their own homes.’ (1928: Book 6, Ch. 7). For Dickens’s use of the name ‘Dick’, see Doubledick, Richard. (13-15, 17-19, 23, 34-38, 40-43, 45, 49, 52, 54, 59, 60, 62, 64)

Diego, Don (RP) The ‘inventor of the last new Flying Machines, price so many francs for ladies, so many more for gentlemen’. (‘A Flight’)

Dilber, Mrs (CB) A laundress, whom Scrooge sees in his vision of the future selling some of his possessions after his death. (A Christmas Carol)

Figure 4 Mr Dick by Harry Furniss

Dingo, Professor (BH) Mrs Bayham Badger’s second husband, who (according to Mr Bayham Badger) had been ‘of European reputation’. (13)

Dingwall, Cornelius Brook (SB) An MP, who was ‘very haughty, solemn and portentous’. He sends his daughter, Lavinia, to the Miss Crumptons’ finishing school, whence she elopes with Theodosius Butler. (‘Tales: Sentiment’)

Diogenes (DS) The Blimbers’ dog, with a fully appropriate classical name. Because Paul had been fond of him, Toots gives him, with the Blimbers’ approval, to Florence. Although he ‘was as ridiculous a dog as one would meet with on a summer’s day’, Florence loves and cherishes him. (14, 18, 22, 23, 28, 30, 31, 35, 41, 44, 48-50, 56)

Diver, Colonel (MC) The editor of the New York Rowdy Journal. He was a ‘sallow gentleman, with sunken cheeks, black hair, small twinkling eyes . . . [and] a mixed expression of vulgar cunning and conceit’. (16)

Dobble, Mr (SB) The host of a New Year’s Eve quadrille party. He is a clerk with a wife, son and daughter. (‘Characters: The New Year’)

Dobbs, Julia (SG) The heroine of the play.