Dunstable & Murdoch Brown
Dunstable is a localised fictional reference to a hypothetical village butcher mentioned by the pompous Uncle Pumblechook during agonizing Christmas in Chapter 4 of Great Expectations. Pumblechook uses Dunstable to deliver a cruel, grotesque hypothetical scenario about how Pip would be slaughtered and sold in the market if he were a pig, emphasizing children's ungratefulness. The reference highlights the emotionally abusive authoritarian environment Pip grows in, where adults treat children as commodities or livestock meant to be controlled or brought up by hand. It subtly reinforces the Novel's larger themes regarding transactions of human relationships and the commodification of the vulnerable lower class children. A striking real world historical parallel to the transactional cruelty of treating vulnerable human beings like commodified livestock occurs in colonial Malabar history. In the Malabar Manual William Logan records an investigation by Thomas Her...