When we went upstairs to bed, [Steerforth] produced the whole seven shillings’ worth, and laid it out on my bed in the moonlight, saying:
‘There you are, young Copperfield, and a royal spread you’ve got.’
(Charles Dickens, David Copperfield) Continue reading “Midnight Feasts”
Tag: David Copperfield
David Copperfield’s Batter Pudding
In my last post, about eating other people’s food, I wrote about the episode in David Copperfield where the young David ‘loses’ his meal to the hungry waiter in the Yarmouth inn. As well as drinking David’s ale and eating his chops, he also dives eagerly into his ‘batter pudding’: Continue reading “David Copperfield’s Batter Pudding”
Eating someone else’s food
When we had done, [the waiter] brought me a pudding, and having set it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become absent in his mind for some moments.
‘How’s the pie?’ he said, rousing himself.
‘It’s a pudding’, I made answer.
‘Pudding!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, bless me, so it is! What!’ looking at it nearer. ‘You don’t mean to say it’s a batter-pudding!’
‘Yes, it is indeed.’
‘Why, a batter-pudding,’ he said, taking up a table-spoon, ‘is my favourite pudding! Ain’t that lucky? Come on, little ‘un, and let’s see who’ll get most.’
The waiter certainly got most. (David Copperfield, Charles Dickens) Continue reading “Eating someone else’s food”
The Hungry Child
As we move into the 19th century, novels begin to take more of an interest in childhood. Whilst Jane Austen touches on the childhood of some of her protagonists (Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland and Fanny Price), novelists writing slightly later develop the childhood of their protagonists as a key element in their plots. Such writers include Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre (1847), and Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1860). Continue reading “The Hungry Child”