Plot Summary
Pip arrives at the Pocket household in Hammersmith and is warmly greeted by Mr. Pocket, a young-looking man with grey hair and a charmingly distraught manner. Mrs. Pocket, absorbed in a book about titles, offers Pip only the vaguest of greetings. Pip is introduced to his two fellow students, Bentley Drummle — a sulky, heavy young man who is next heir but one to a baronetcy — and Startop, a younger, studious gentleman. Pip quickly discovers that the household is effectively run by the servants, Flopson and Millers, while Mr. and Mrs. Pocket drift through domestic life in a state of helpless bewilderment.
During dinner, the cook mislays the beef, prompting Mr. Pocket to perform his characteristic gesture of seizing his hair and attempting to lift himself from his chair. Mrs. Coiler, a fawning neighbour, flatters everyone shamelessly. After dinner, the children are brought in and a near-catastrophe unfolds when the baby is given nutcrackers to play with, nearly injuring itself until little Jane intervenes. Mrs. Pocket scolds Jane for "interfering," provoking Mr. Pocket's despairing outburst about babies being "nutcrackered into their tombs." The evening concludes with rowing on the Thames and a final domestic crisis: the cook is found drunk on the kitchen floor with butter she planned to sell for grease. Mrs. Pocket blames the housemaid who reported it rather than the cook, and Mr. Pocket collapses on the sofa in the attitude of the Dying Gladiator.
Character Development
This chapter provides Pip's first sustained portrait of the Pocket family. Mr. Pocket emerges as an intelligent, Cambridge-educated man who has been ground down by a chaotic household and an impractical wife, his frustration expressed through his futile hair-pulling gesture. Mrs. Pocket is revealed as a woman whose upbringing — raised to marry a title and shielded from all "plebeian domestic knowledge" — has left her ornamental but wholly incapable of managing a home or caring for her children. Little Jane, though barely more than a toddler, has already assumed responsibility that her parents cannot exercise. Pip also begins to form impressions of Drummle and Startop, his future companions and foils.
Themes and Motifs
The chapter's dominant theme is the hollowness of social pretension. Mrs. Pocket's obsession with titles and her grandfather's imagined baronetcy renders her useless as a mother and partner, while the servants — nominally her social inferiors — hold actual power in the household. Dickens extends his satire to Mrs. Coiler, the toady neighbour who traffics in empty flattery, and to Drummle, whose aristocratic birth earns Mrs. Pocket's respect despite his sullen character. The inversion of authority — servants commanding parents, a small child protecting the baby — underscores the absurdity of a social order based on birth rather than competence. The chapter also introduces the motif of domestic chaos as comedy, with lost beef, drunk cooks, and nutcracker-wielding infants creating a farcical atmosphere that masks genuine dysfunction.
Literary Devices
Dickens employs satire throughout, using the Pocket household as a microcosm of class-obsessed English society. Mr. Pocket's repeated attempts to lift himself by his own hair serve as a recurring comic motif that symbolizes his futile efforts to rise above his impossible situation. Irony pervades the chapter: Mrs. Pocket scolds Jane for saving the baby, the cook who called Mrs. Pocket "born to be a Duchess" is found drunk stealing butter, and Mrs. Pocket blames the messenger rather than the offender. Dickens also uses first-person narration with understated wit — Pip's dry observation that "the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen" reveals more about the household's dysfunction than any direct condemnation could. The closing image of Mr. Pocket in "the attitude of the Dying Gladiator" is an allusion to classical sculpture that elevates his domestic despair to mock-heroic proportions.