Quotation from: Great Expectations

Written by: Charles Dickens


Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That
ass, Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose
of discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe
(to this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel), that if
these hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise-cart,
they would have done it. The miserable man was a man of that
confined stolidity of mind, that he could not discuss my prospects
without having me before him - as it were, to operate upon - and he
would drag me up from my stool (usually by the collar) where I was
quiet in a corner, and, putting me before the fire as if I were
going to be cooked, would begin by saying, "Now, Mum, here is this
boy! Here is this boy which you brought up by hand. Hold up your
head, boy, and be for ever grateful unto them which so did do. Now,
Mum, with respections to this boy!" And then he would rumple my
hair the wrong way - which from my earliest remembrance, as already
hinted, I have in my soul denied the right of any fellow-creature
to do - and would hold me before him by the sleeve: a spectacle of
imbecility only to be equalled by himself.

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