“Seven trewe bataylis for Jesus Sake”: The Long-Suffering Saracen Palomides

Abstract

David Copperfield is born on a Friday, he tells us, because on that day of the week his mother is frightened by the sudden and terrifying appearance of her late husband’s aunt, Miss Betsey Trotwood. Instead of knocking at the door like the decent, though eccentric, Christian woman we eventually learn her to be, Aunt Betsey presses her face, flat and distorted, against the window; Copperfield later recalls: “looking round the room, slowly and inquiringly, [she] began on the other side, and carried her eyes on, like a Saracen’s Head in a Dutch Clock, until they reached my mother.”¹ No Victorian reader of this first number of the novel in 1849 would have found the sinister reference to the cold stare of a Saracen obscure or ambivalent. Betsey Trotwood’s look was fierce. A Saracen could not possibly have been up to any good.