My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand. She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand.
– Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Chapter 2. Orphan Pip is brought up by older sister Mrs. Joe and her husband Joe Gargery, who become substitute parents after the death of his parents. Using verbal irony and satire, Dickens describes how his Pip and Joe were “brought up by hand” by Pip’s nasty sister. The phrase has a double meaning. Literally it means a child being raised by someone other than its mother, through hand feeding. But it also refers to the heavy-handed Mrs. Joe’s generous use of corporal punishment to control her younger brother and husband. Both are smacked regularly, it seems. Dickens is using hyperbole to mock how Victorian guardians brought up their children with the help of the rod and physical punishment.