Great Expectations: Confusion

The entire dinner conversation from pg. 23-27 is completely confusing me.  The sentences in this passage are long and "wordy."  Also, every sentence seems to have a different meaning that I cannot decipher! 

Here are a few sentence from the passage:
Mr. Pumblechook says to Pip, "Think what you've got to be grateful for.  If you'd been born a squeaker-"
"He was, if ever a child was," said Mrs. Joe.
Joe gave me some more gravy. 
"Well, I mean a four-footed squeaker," said Mr. Pumblechook.  "If you had been born such, would you have been here now?  Not you-"
"Unless in that form" said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish [of swine].


 What is the point of the seemingly ridiculous dinner conversation?  What are the guests discussing, literally and metaphorically?  Help needed!  Thank you!! 

               In the play, Gwendolen speaks eloquently and politely in an attempt to get her way.  Gwendolen chooses diction that appears harmless on the surface, even if she has negative intentions.  She does this so that people will listen to her.  To Algernon, she says, "Algy, kindly turn your back.  I have something very particular to say to Mr. Worthing."  If she had said directly that she was going to say something negative, he wouldn't have listened.  Instead, she used a sweet tone and polite language to make him feel secure and obey.  Gwendolen also uses language to mask her true feelings.  She says to Jack, "The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me."  Although she is saying he is either unintelligent or shallow, she words it beautifully in order to distract him from her statement.  Gwendolen is using beauty as a tool to gain power.  Gwendolen even uses the beauty of others to gain social respect.  She says, "What wonderfully blue eyes you have, Ernest...I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present."  She doesn't simply enjoy Ernest's eyes for their beauty, she is only interested in how others view her because of them.  She expects others to have the same views on beauty as she does.  In the play, Gwendolen sees beauty as simply a ladder up to respect and social status.

Above is my body paragraph.  I loved that I got the opportunity to write about Gwendolyn, because I thought that it was so clever of Wilde to create her!  At first, I was going to discuss her shallowness, but I decided that it didn't really fit with the aesthetic principles.  Do you think that my third concrete detail fits with the rest of the paragraph?  Also, does my concluding sentence seem long enough?