Great Expectations Chapter 23 Summary

Summary

Pip arrives at Mr. Matthew Pocket’s house and is shown to a pleasant room that will serve as his private sitting-room. He meets Mr. and Mrs. Pocket: Mr. Pocket is distracted but kindly and cultivated, while Mrs. Pocket is ornamental, pretentious, and oddly indifferent to practical matters. Pip is also introduced to two other boarders—Bentley Drummle, a sulky young man who is revealed to be heir to a baronetcy, and Startop, a studious, gentle youth. The household is run more by its servants than by the nominal heads; the servants are comfortable and keep lively company, which gives the house an appearance of being in other people’s hands.

At dinner Pip encounters Mrs. Coiler, a toadying neighbour, and witnesses the Pockets’ social foibles: Mrs. Pocket’s obsession with rank and titles, Mr. Pocket’s comic and helpless attempts to steady himself (including repeatedly trying to 'lift himself up by his hair'), and the chaotic handling of the children by nurses Flopson and Millers. A domestic crisis—the cook being found drunk and a bundle of butter hidden to be sold—provokes more theatrical reactions than practical solutions, with Mrs. Pocket quick to blame and to claim injured status as a granddaugther of a supposed dignitary. After evening rowing and a supper-tray, Mr. Pocket collapses in despair on a sofa and Pip withdraws to bed, leaving the household in its disordered but comic state.

Through his observations and the behaviour of others, Pip begins to understand the Pockets’ social pretensions, the dependence on servants, and the muddled domestic authority at work. He also notices Drummle’s aristocratic bearing and hears Mr. Pocket’s background as a former grinder and literary tutor, which explains the household’s mixture of gentility and precarious finances.

Key events

1. Pip is welcomed and shown his room by Mr. Pocket
2. Introductions to Drummle and Startop as fellow boarders
3. Dinner with Mrs. Pocket, Mrs. Coiler, and the household children; comic domestic chaos
4. Mr. Pocket repeatedly gestures by putting hands in his hair and trying to 'lift himself up by it'
5. Conversation reveals Drummle's near-baronetcy and Mr. Pocket's background
6. Cook is found drunk with butter hidden to be sold, provoking scandal and Mrs. Pocket's accusations

Analysis

This chapter develops the novel’s social satire and comic realism by presenting the Pocket household as a microcosm of genteel pretension undermined by practical incompetence. Dickens uses Pip’s observant first-person voice to measure the gap between rank and capability: Mrs. Pocket’s aristocratic airs and obsession with titles contrast sharply with the servants’ effective control of the house and the family’s inability to manage ordinary crises. Mr. Pocket embodies the novel’s sympathetic but ineffectual intellectual: educated and genteel, yet habitually distracted and financially precarious, his repeated attempts to 'lift himself up by his hair' function as a running comic motif that signals impotence rather than bravado.

Structurally the chapter expands Pip’s social world in London, introducing important secondary characters (Drummle, Startop, Herbert’s father) and sketching the domestic hierarchies that will inform Pip’s future interactions. The scene-work—dinner, children, a ruined cook—is composed to emphasize performative dignity collapsing under ordinary needs. Symbols are subdued but present: the misplaced beef and hidden butter stand for the house’s inability to reconcile appearance with substance. Narrative technique relies on ironic distance: Pip’s mixture of respect, embarrassment, and quiet amusement lets Dickens satirize class aspirations without descending into cruelty, while foreshadowing tensions (Drummle’s sulkiness and social advantage, Mr. Pocket’s unreliable authority) that may shape later conflicts.

Important quotes

“He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very grey hair, and his manner seemed quite natural.”

NarratorPip's first impression of Mr. Pocket: educated and unaffected despite distraction.

“He laid down the carving-knife and fork,—being engaged in carving, at the moment,—put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it.”

NarratorA comic, repeated gesture by Mr. Pocket that highlights his helplessness and comic despair.

Characters in Chapter 23

• Mr. Pocket
• Mrs. Pocket
• Drummle
• Startop
• Pip
• Mrs. Coiler
• Flopson
• Millers
• Miss Jane
• baby
• the cook
• the page
• Herbert Pocket
• Sophia