As Pip struts through his village in Chapter XXX acting
the new gentleman that he is, he feels proud of himself until Trabb's boy prostrates
himself in the street in mock humility and mimicking Pip in a haught voice, “Don't know
yah, don't know yah, 'pon my soul don't know yah!”
Pursuing
Pip, Trabb's boy makes crowing sounds, and follows Pip across the bridge. After he
arrives in London again, Pip has a package sent to Joe and then he writes to Mr. Trabb,
saying that he cannot be treated in such a way, and
to say that Mr. Pip must decline to deal further
with one who could so far forget what he owed to the best interests of society, as to
employ a boy who excited Loathing in every respectable
mind.
Then, in Chapter XXXI,
Pip finds a handbill in his pocket that tells of Mr. Wopsle's--Mr. Waldengarver, as he
now calls himself--acting debut as Hamlet. Pip offers to take Herbert in order to
"comfort and abet" Herbert's affairs of the heart. Once at the theatre, Pip notices how
the crowd mocks the affected Wopsle, answering his questions in the "To be or not to be"
soliloquy, and shouting at and mocking him when his stockings reveal his white leg, or
yelling "wai-ter" as Wopsle waves a handerchief in the graveyard scene. Even Pip and
Herbert cannot stiffle their own laughs.
After the play,
however, Mr. Waldengarver appears to have interpreted the mockings another way, telling
Pip,
I had the
happiness to know you in former times, and the Drama has ever had a claim which has ever
been acknowledged, on the noble and the
affluent.”
Like Pip, he
blames he fails to perceive his own shirtcomings. When Pip and Herbert flatter him,
Mr. Wopsle soaks up their praises in self-delusion. As Pip blames Trabb's boy's
outrageous behavior as coming from one who is "a dodging serpent," Pip, too, is deluded
in not seeing himself as snobbish and putting on airs. Neither Mr. Wopsle nor Pip
examine how they have assumed unauthentic appearances and brought the ridicule upon
themselves.
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