Mr. Pumblechook as a sexual predator in Great Expectations

I’ve never looked at Great Expectations by Charles Dickens closely before I took this class. However, when I looked at the novel this time around, I began to notice certain characteristics about Mr. Pumblechook that I hadn’t seen before. Certain passages led me to believe that he was a pedophile or a child molester. At first I thought that perhaps I was reading too closely but when I went back I felt that my feelings were correct. I found him to be a very secretive and paranoid man about this as well. This no longer seemed radical to me because there have been other characters in Dickens’s works that have sexual predator qualities (Fagan in Oliver Twist).
The first time I noticed this was in Chapter Eight on pg 49 where Pip mentions the “little drawers” in Pumblechook’s shop. Pip himself knows a lot about being secretive, which perhaps is why his attention was drawn to these little drawers. Also, drawers are a lot like pockets because they are used for storage...