Matthew Pocket

Matthew Pocket is the tutor Mr. Jaggers selects to prepare Pip for his expected life as a gentleman, and the father of Herbert Pocket. He is both a practical guide to Pip’s education and a measure of the moral qualities that Pip’s new social ambitions often obscure: Matthew’s work is conscientious, his dealings honourable, and his family’s generosity becomes especially clear when Pip defends them to Miss Havisham.## Identity and IntroductionMatthew is Miss Havisham’s cousin, though kinship does not mean closeness. Herbert explains that his father is a poor courtier who will not ingratiate himself with Miss Havisham, and that there is no familiar intercourse between the cousins. Pip has already heard Matthew’s name in connection with Miss Havisham’s relations: he remembers Matthew as the person expected to stand at the head of her coffin when she lay dead in her wedding dress. That morbid association gives way to a more immediate role when Jaggers names him as a possible tutor for Pip.## Tutor to PipJaggers proposes Matthew as someone who might suit the purpose, while carefully declining to recommend him. Pip accepts the choice because he knows no tutor besides Biddy and Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, and Jaggers arranges for him to meet Herbert in London before going to Matthew’s home. Matthew understands more about Pip’s intended future than Pip does: Jaggers has told him that Pip is not being prepared for a profession, but should be educated well enough to hold his own among young men in prosperous circumstances. His teaching is therefore aimed at general competence and social preparation, not a defined trade. Matthew recommends that Pip attend places in London to acquire the rudiments he lacks and offers to act as explainer and director of his studies. He puts their arrangement on confidential terms and carries out his side of it with such zeal and honour that Pip says he was made zealous and honourable in return. In retrospect, Pip insists that nothing in Matthew’s work as a tutor struck him as merely comic: in that relationship, he found him serious, honest, and good. Their formal pupil-and-tutor connection eventually ends, but they remain on the best of terms.## Family and CharacterAt the Pocket home in Hammersmith, Matthew appears amid the disorder of a household that his wife, Belinda Pocket, does little to manage. Herbert jokes about his father’s establishment and its poor housekeeping, but the narration also shows Matthew’s anxious care: after the children have been taken indoors, he comes out to meet Pip looking perplexed, his grey hair disordered as if he cannot see how to set anything straight. He asks Belinda whether she has welcomed their guest, while she responds absently from her book. The domestic confusion offers a contrast to Matthew’s conscientious conduct as Pip’s tutor; his disarray is not presented as evidence of dishonesty or indifference to Pip. Herbert’s frank affection for his father also helps make the household’s failings visible without reducing its members to them. When Pip later meets Matthew and Herbert among Miss Havisham’s relations, he has ample grounds to distinguish their character from the family’s calculating behaviour.## Pip’s Defence and Miss Havisham’s ResponseMiss Havisham’s relations have treated Pip as though his expected fortune displaced them in her favour. Matthew and Herbert, however, have been generous and open with him even while they believed he had superseded them. When Pip confronts Miss Havisham, he says that his experience of the Pockets has shown him they are upright and incapable of designing or mean conduct. He adds that they made themselves his friends when they supposed him to have taken their place, at a time when Sarah Pocket, Miss Georgiana, and Camilla were not his friends. The contrast matters: Pip speaks not from an abstract judgement of the family but from the conduct he has experienced, and he refuses to let Miss Havisham’s suspicion stand unchallenged. His defence appears to affect her; she listens, and then asks what he wants for the Pockets.## Legacy and SignificanceAfter Miss Havisham’s fire, Joe tells the recovering Pip how her property was settled. Most of it was tied up for Estella, but a handwritten codicil made shortly before the accident left Matthew four thousand pounds. Joe explains that the bequest was made because of Pip’s account of Matthew. The legacy gives material consequence to Pip’s defence: his recognition and testimony about Matthew’s character have helped secure a substantial provision for him. Pip takes great joy in the news, because it completes what he calls the only good thing he had done. Matthew’s importance to Pip’s story thus extends beyond instruction. He represents a form of gentility grounded in honest work and mutual obligation, and his eventual reward follows from Pip’s willingness to acknowledge that goodness rather than measure people by rank or presumed fortune.