Mr. Pocket

Mr. Matthew Herbert Pocket is a gentleman and scholar of genteel birth who serves as Pip (Philip Pirrip)'s tutor in London, overseeing his education in various accomplishments and languages. Though well-born and educated, Herbert Pocket has failed to achieve great worldly success, existing in a state of genteel poverty burdened by an expensive and frivolous wife and a household of scheming, ungrateful relations. Yet he maintains his intellectual dignity and scholarly integrity despite these pressures. His character represents the tragedy of those born to a certain station without the financial means to sustain it comfortably, a position that places him among Dickens's most sympathetic portraits of genteel decline.