again to the reader the hypocrisy of those who aspire to be upper class.

With characteristic humor, Dickens describes the fabricated nobility of Mrs. Pocket. She is supposedly the daughter of a knight, who is "a quite accidental deceased Knight."  Thus, there is no proof of her lineage.  As Dickens's narrator, Pip continues to describe her family with confused humor:

...his father would have been made a Baronet but for someone's determined opposition, the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Chancellor's...I forget whose, if I ever knew....I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of a pen in a desperate address...for the laying of a stone for some building or another.

In reality, Mr. Pocket, a distinguished scholar at Cambridge, has lowered himself by marrying Mrs. Pocket, yet, Mrs. Pocket is treated with respect because she never married anyone with a title while he is treated with reproach for not having earned one. And, as the chapter continues, Pip perceives the true emptiness of Mrs. Pocket's supposed entitlement.  For, she ignores her children who are only saved from peril by the close observation of the servants.  When, for instance, Jane saves the baby from harm with a nutcracker, Mrs. Pocket berates her for interfering, as she has previously done when a neighbor contacts her about a servant's mistreatment of another child.  It is also futile for Mr. Pocket, who wrings his hair in despair, to correct her because, as she remarks, "Am I grandpapa's granddaughter to be nothing in the house?"

Mrs. Pocket is a characterization of those who aspire to be aristocrats, just as is Uncle Pumblechook's.  In several episodes of his novel, Charles Dickens ridicules the rising middle class that wishes to arise to what he considers a frivolous aristocracy.  Indeed, Mrs. Pocket is perfect for such satire.

Belinda Pocket is helpless, dependent, and totally fixated upon titles and luxury; these elements of her character are the direct result of her upbringing.  Belinda was "the only daughter of a...knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a baronet but for somebody's determined opposition".  This gentleman had therefore "tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth" during his lifetime, and had actually managed to secure a knighthood for himself for some unremembered accomplishment.  Secure in his own belief in his family's prestigious lineage, Belinda's father had made sure that his daughter was "brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge".  As a consequence, Belinda grew up "highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless", and completely out of touch with the real world.  Belinda eventually married Matthew Pocket, and belatedly earned her father's blessing.  Although after their marriage Matthew Pocket tried to acquaint his young bride with "the ways of the world", his efforts were met with little success (Chapter 23).

Finding himself confronted by the curiously vague and bizarre behaviour of Belinda Pocket, Pip finds out in this chapter the reason why she is so detached from the real world and not at all linked in any meaningful way to reality, as is shown by her tendency to throw out comments that are compltely unrelated to anything else, "in general conversational condescension."

He discovers that Belinda Pocket was the only child of a "accidental deceased Knight" who had managed to convince himself that he should have been made a Baronet were it not for the opposition of some important figure out of personal motives. As a result of this fervent belief, he had instructed that his daughter be brought up as one who should have enjoyed this rank that he feels should have been his:

Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the natur eof things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebian domestic knowledge.

So successful was he in this effort that Mrs. Pocket grew up to be "highly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless." This of course explains her erratic and bizarre behaviour and the way that she is so detached from the common sphere of reality in the novel.