Summary

Analysis

Here the comic and the pathetic are intermingled — little Jo providing the pathos and the Chadbands the comedy. Mr. Chadhand, whom Dickens satirizes, is one of the book’s numerous eccentrics but is also a type: He represents the loud, voluble, but empty and rather hypocritical sermonizer, a species not rare in Dickens’ era.

Dickens keeps two important threads running here: the mystery of Esther’s identity and the mystery of Lady Dedlock’s pursuit of the facts about Nemo. Little Jo’s “moving on” from one nowhere to another nowhere continues the motif of childhood sorrow.