Mrs. Pocket

Mrs. Pocket is the wife of Matthew Pocket and the mother of a household of children whose upbringing appears to proceed without her attentive direction. When Pip visits the family at Hammersmith, he finds her reading in the garden while her nursemaids watch the children; her amiable dignity and distracted habits make her a quietly comic portrait of gentility detached from domestic responsibility.

Identity and Household

Mrs. Pocket belongs to the family circle Pip enters after arriving in London. Her husband, Matthew Pocket, provides the connection through which Herbert brings Pip to the house, but the first impression of family life is not an orderly household: the children play in the garden overlooking the river under the nurses’ supervision. Pip judges that they seem not to be growing up or being brought up so much as “tumbling up,” a phrase that turns his observation into a critique of neglectful nurture.

The scene makes care visible as work performed by others. While the children play near the river, one nurse warns two of them that they could fall in and drown, and another retrieves Mrs. Pocket’s handkerchief after she has dropped it repeatedly. Mrs. Pocket accepts the correction with thanks, settles back into her book, and soon becomes absorbed in asking after Pip’s mother, despite the difficulty of the question for a visitor who has no living mother to report on.

Introduction at Hammersmith

Pip and Herbert arrive at Matthew Pocket’s house after taking a coach from Barnard’s Inn. They pass through a gate into a small garden overlooking the river, where the children are playing. Herbert introduces Pip as young Mr. Pip, and Mrs. Pocket receives him with an appearance of amiable dignity. The manners of formal welcome sit beside the practical disorder around her: the children need watching, the nurses intervene, and her attention repeatedly shifts from her book to the people nearby.

Her comic inattentiveness is conveyed through small, observable actions rather than open hostility or deliberate cruelty. A nurse points out the danger of the children’s play and retrieves the handkerchief; Mrs. Pocket thanks her, resumes reading, and then asks whether Pip’s mother is well. Pip struggles to answer, and the nurse has to come to his rescue. The exchange reveals a woman whose concern for appearances and social forms coexists with limited attention to the circumstances immediately before her.

Family Relations and Care

Mrs. Pocket’s maternal position contrasts with the actual distribution of care in her household. The nursemaids supervise the children and manage immediate risks; one warns them away from bushes beside the river, while another keeps track of Mrs. Pocket’s dropped handkerchief. The episode does not show Mrs. Pocket directing their upbringing. Instead, Pip’s impression that the children are “tumbling up” makes their disorder an index of the adults’ uneven responsibilities.

The contrast is especially pointed because the household presents itself through the language and appearance of gentility. Mrs. Pocket’s reception of Pip has an air of dignity, but the scene surrounds that formality with interruptions, dropped belongings, and children who require warnings. Dickens thus sets social bearing against domestic competence without making Mrs. Pocket a villain: the humor arises from the mismatch between her self-presentation and the ordinary demands of family life.

Narrative Role and Significance

Mrs. Pocket’s brief appearance expands the novel’s scrutiny of class and education beyond Pip’s own household. Pip has been learning to associate gentility with distinction, yet at Hammersmith he sees a household in which genteel status does not guarantee sound judgment or effective care. The children’s upbringing, entrusted in practice to nurses while their mother reads, makes inherited or performed social position look inadequate beside the daily responsibilities of raising a family.

The scene also places Pip among the domestic world of Matthew Pocket and Herbert, a setting that helps measure his expectations against lived reality. Mrs. Pocket’s polished welcome is neither wholly false nor sufficient: it coexists with genuine household disorder. Her characterization rests on that tension, and on the comic precision with which a warning about drowning, a repeatedly dropped handkerchief, and a misplaced question about Pip’s mother reveal more than a general claim about her character could.