Editing The Luck of Barry Lyndon (section)

===Nobility of heart===
This question of nobility of heart as opposed to that of birth is in the air: Dickens takes it up four years after Barry Lyndon in Great Expectations (1860), another first-person novel, where he has Herbert Pocket say exactly the same thing as he undertakes to instill some life principles in young Pip and quotes his father Matthew Pocket: "It is one of his principles that no man has ever behaved like a gentleman without first having been, since the world began, a gentleman at heart. He says, there is no veneer that can hide the grain of wood, and the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself." In the same novel, Joe Gargery the blacksmith, who has always protected Pip from the wrath of his shrewish sister, goes to London to see his young brother-in-law. Not knowing quite what to do with his hat on arrival, he realizes that Pip is now ashamed of him; sorry for not having respected his rank, he returns disillusioned to his forge, while Pip, led astray by snobbery, says, "He made me lose my temper and exasperated me" (chapter XXVII, p. 631).