Jaggers — the name just seems to reflect the character. Jagged and dagger-like. There is nothing rounded-off or soft about that man. He is all angles and sharp edges. Like a dagger he seems to cut straight to the heart of most matters. He’s all business at all times. “I am paid for my services or I wouldn’t render them,” he says to Pip.

And yet he takes the care to worry about Pip and his interactions with Drummle, warning him to keep his distance.  In addition, we find in chapter 51, we read

“Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this power: “I know what you did, and how you did it. You came so and so, you did such and such things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through it all, and I tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should be necessary to produce it to clear you, and then it shall be produced. Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If you are saved, your child is saved too; if you are lost, your child is still saved.” Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was cleared.”

Here we see him not standing unaffected in the the horror of Victorian London but rather moved to save the one child he can save.

So why that hard, jagged exterior? Perhaps it’s an understandable cynicism about the number of children “he saw in his daily business life [whom] he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.” He has literally seen it all — probably even executions of kids — and it has made him cynical about the level of “justice” the system seems to be metes out to the less fortunate. He knows that a child born into poverty in Victorian England is a child destined to suffer for her entire life. He knows that such poverty in London leads almost always in one direction to prison. The word choice in describing this is so effective as well: he sees them “as so much spawn,” just children produced without thought, without worry about the future or consequences. They’re no more important as individuals as newly-spawned fish in a hatchery, and they’re as easily destroyed.

I wonder if this cynicism reflects Dickens’s own cynicism.