But they wouldn’t leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and then, and stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate little bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these moral goads.
– Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Chapter 4. Pip’s childhood Christmas dinner with the Gargerys and their guests was an unpleasant and humiliating one, he recalls. In a metaphor he compares himself to a little bull in a bullring, goaded and speared by the criticisms of the adults. This is an allusion to the Spanish bullfighting arena, where the bull is provoked and aggravated by the picador and banderilleros before being finally stabbed and killed with a sword by the matador.