Betsey Trotwood is one of my favorite characters in all of Dickens' oeuvre. Some renditions of Miss Trotwood:

Much too severe.

Much better.

Same actress but no, Miss Trotwood did not smile sweetly like that.

Better still.

The quintessence of Betsey Trotwood is a loving, caring person beneath a hard shell, a type, it seems to me, of a strong British woman whom it should be easy, it seems to me, to find, or to "act up" to depict. Miss Trotwood had pain in her life which should be present about her eyes, which is not present above, in the best character portrayal of her I could find. There is, however, in the image immediately above, the care in her character; perhaps I see it in her intent expression of listening. Miss Trotwood did a lot of listening and a lot of thinking. Perhaps if her mask dropped a bit, as when she rubbed her nose when she was vexed, and her soft underside showed through a little, you'd have the Betsey Trotwood as Dickens wrote her and which I have in my mind's eye.

How much better David Copperfield would have been had Dickens not written Dora in as David's wife; had written any other "type" in at all, or never married David off. Dora is superfluous to the story and perversely superficial as a character. Dickens kills her off and has David marry Agnes later in the book. Dora asks him to call her his "child-wife." Perverse. She is child-like emotionally and mentally. Dickens calls his later wife, Agnes, "sister." Perverse. I believe Copperfield was serialized; if so, I wonder if the Dora character was so criticized that Dickens killed her off.