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For me, Rosa started off as one of Dickens' sickly sweet pretty little heroines, but she did at least have the oomph to break off the engagement. Helena was a much more interesting young woman. I suppose I liked the idea of Datchery being Helena in disguise because she had the courage and drive to do it.
While it seems hard to believe she could get away with it, there were real live cases of women masquerading as men and fooling everyone. I seem to remember reading about one who worked as a doctor in the US during the Civil War or some other 19th century war?
I really don't care for Dickens' caricatures: they always seem laboured and unfunny to me, but of course tastes change over time. And the same is true with the wickedness of Jasper and the heavy-handed pointers to things like the quicklime. It's all about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
The child called Deputy or Winks sounds like a serial killer in the making, but given the awful life he was living, it's no wonder he was so vicious. I wonder if he was going to be redeemed by the end of the book and perhaps adopted by Helena and Crisparkle. On the other hand he might have been killed in the quest to capture Jasper. Dickens did like child deathbed scenes.
Still, Dickens does get some good atmosphere going right at the beginning in the opium den, and at various other times, and you can see why people were so caught up in his serialised books.
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