Mrs. Pocket Quotes

Mr. and Mrs. Pocket’s children were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 22. Pip, on meeting Herbert’s family, comments on how wealthy middle class parents have little input into bringing up their children. Mrs. Pocket spends her time in a garden chair under a tree reading, while the children run around and play watched over by two nursemaids. The youngsters keep tripping over Mrs. Pocket’s footstool under her skirts and tumbling over her. Dickens is satirizing the bad parenting of well off couples like the Pockets.

Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody’s determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives…He had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 23. Dickens can be merciless when it comes to satirizing Victorian England’s class system and its pretentious and incompetent snobs. One humorous example of this is Mrs. Pocket, a ridiculous and silly woman who is obsessed with titles and social status. The daughter of a knight who has been brought up to “marry a title,” she doesn’t quite manage this, her husband being a Cambridge-educated scholar and tutor. The “useless” Mrs. Pocket has never been taught any practical domestic skills because her aristocratic father put no value on these. So when it comes to properly running her own household and manage her seven children, she is “perfectly helpless.”

Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else’s hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 23. Here Pip describes the household of Matthew and Mrs. Pocket, where ironically the servants are in charge and not the Pockets. Dickens uses the Pockets to satirize the pretensions and incompetence of the aristocracy. The title-obsessed Mrs. Pocket, whose father was a knight, neglects her children and leaves them to be cared for by the servants.

Before I had been there a week, a neighbouring lady with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing that the neighbours couldn’t mind their own business.

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 23. Mrs. Pocket is not just a neglectful and incompetent mother, but she is harmful to her children. When her baby is physically abused by one of her servants, she is more concerned about what the neighbors say and her social image than the baby’s welfare. The pretentious Mrs. Pocket is one of Dickens’s great satirical characters, highlighting the dysfunctional nature of upper class Victorian parents.

I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket’s falling into a discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane, – “You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 23. Dickens comically satirizes upper class parents who neglect responsibility for the care of their children. The dysfunctional dynamics of the Pockets and their bad parentings of seven children, including a baby, are highlighted here. Mrs. Pocket gets engrossed in a conversation about titles, forgetting that she has a baby on her lap playing with a dangerous nutcracker. And when young daughter Jane rescues the baby from possible injury, Mrs. Pocket accuses her of being disrespectful. The daughter turns out to be a better parent than her mother and gets reprimanded for it. Mrs. Pocket is not just a negligent and inattentive mother obsessed with her own importance, but she is also harmful to her children.

“Good God!” cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. “Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?”

– Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Chapter 23. An exasperated Matthew Pocket reacts to his inattentive and incompetent wife letting the baby on her lap play with a dangerous nutcracker. The dramatic and violent metaphorical image of babies being “nut-crackered into their tombs” highlights the parental neglect of the Pocket children. Mrs. Pocket, who is obsessed with social status, becomes so engrossed in a conversation about aristocratic titles, she forgets about the baby on her lap. Dickens is satirizing pretentious parents who prioritize social climbing over caring for their children.
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