Favorite Characters: Herbert Pocket (Great Expectations)

I’d be the first to voice my appreciation for flawed characters.  I love seeing someone wrestle with their own fears and failings, someone who struggles with doing the right thing and doesn’t always know if they’re worth saving.  Every once in a while, though, I come across a character who just makes me happy.  Herbert Pocket is one such fellow.

Like Pip, we meet Herbert first as a child – just once, but it’s a memorable introduction.  Even not knowing his name, we remember Pip’s encounter with him, and when, as adults, Pip realizes where he met Herbert before, we instantly recall the incident.  On the grounds of Miss Havisham’s crumbling Satis House, Pip is accosted by a “pale young gentleman” eager for a fight.  In most stories, this scene would show a spoiled young rich boy picking on a poor boy and getting what for, but with Herbert, it’s clear that he means Pip no ill will.  He doesn’t pick a fight because Pip is a commoner raised by a blacksmith; he picks a fight because he enjoys it, as a sport.  He cheerfully provides Pip with a “reason” to fight him by dutifully pulling his hair and head-butting him in the stomach, announces that they’re to follow “regular rules,” and arranges water and a sponge “available for both.”  Even better, he’s a terrible fighter, but he keeps springing back up for more every time Pip knocks him down.  The whole situation sort of appears out of nowhere, and I daresay most first-time readers probably find it just as perplexing as Pip does, and yet I know I couldn’t help but like this inept-but-tenacious pugilist.

Though Herbert apologizes profusely for the fight when he and Pip meet again as adults, it nicely demonstrates Herbert’s chief traits:  he throws himself into things with whole-hearted abandon, he doesn’t give up for anything, and even when he starts a fistfight with a stranger, it’s evident that he doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body.  Upon Pip’s arrival in London to pursue a gentleman’s education, Herbert is one of his earliest and most sincere friends.  He corrects Pip’s rough-around-the-edges manners only because Pip asks him to, and he does it with such gentle, offhand unconcern that hardly anyone could be embarrassed by his amiable instruction.  He doesn’t mind that Pip doesn’t initially act like a gentleman and doesn’t think less of him for his origins.  Throughout the book, he supports Pip in nearly everything he does – he gives Joe a far warmer welcome in London than Pip would, he expresses his misgivings about Estella purely out of concern for Pip’s well-being, and he sticks by Pip through the whole Magwitch situation.

If anything, he’s better at helping his friends than himself.  He has aspirations, hoping to get into the business of insuring ships, but without any capital to speak of, he “looks about [him]” for opportunities that aren’t forthcoming.  Likewise, he falls in love with Clara and intends to marry her, but any plans between them are stalled until he gets on his feet financially.  And if anyone was agreeable to a fault, it’s probably Herbert.  Pip’s profligacy gets Herbert into plenty of money trouble of his own, and it’s far more a matter of Herbert going along with Pip than of overspending by choice (more reason, by the way, to be irritated with Pip – not one of my favorite Dickens protagonists.)  Whatever his situation, however, he remains, if not always content, always sanguine.  I love one of Pip’s first observations about the adult Herbert, that he wears his shabby suit better than Pip wears his expensive one.  That one line shows you so much of his disposition and his outlook, and it offers a glimpse of how happy Pip could be if he didn’t spend so much time concentrating on what breeding, possessions, or status he doesn’t have.