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.”