Here a few remarks you may use in your commentary.

The irony in the passage should not be wasted on you! Here are a few examples:

Uriah Heep is still – and always – ‘umble’.

Uriah says that the previous day’s beef was not cooked quite to his taste and presents this as a severe punishment – whereas most working people rarely ever eat beef at all. Similarly, Littimer complains that the milk in his cocoa (a luxury in itself) is mixed with water.

Littimer, like Uriah, mentions his ‘follies’ (an understatement or euphemism) and ‘weaknesses’, without entering into any detail. However, Littimer dwells/expands on honest people’s (David’s) ‘wickedness and sin’. Furthermore, he says that David ‘has been a party’ to them, whereas he downplays his own responsibility. ‘Logically’, he sternly lectures David. He concludes by taking the moral high ground again, this time in reference to Emily (you should explain this implicit reference), showing himself as her victim.

Of course, all the time the irony is heightened by the approbation of the spectators.

This passage is evidence that Dickens is a populist, not a socialist. He sympathizes for the ‘deserving’, ‘upright’ working-class and contrasts it with criminals. He does not grasp (or maybe he does grasp, but rejects) the idea that most inmates are working-class people and that crime is also a social issue. Nor does he seem to think that convicts should be treated humanely.

In retrospect, this description is rather surprising. Who could imagine that the prisons of Victorian England were so like luxury resorts?

However, Dickens may not aim at describing a current state of affairs, but rather warn against a possible development. He seems to criticize not the actual state of prisons and condition of prisoners, but rather the ideas of philanthropists, more precisely prison reformers. [John Howard (1726-1790) was the first English prison reformer. He was followed by Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845).]

However, this passage goes beyond this possibly narrow-minded vision of humanitarianism. Dickens develops a (prophetic?) vision of an absurd, ‘mimetic’, almost mechanical society.

Mr Creakle ‘received me, like a man who had formed my mind in bygone years, and had always loved me tenderly’. He is either hypocritical or, because David has become famous, he sincerely “remembers” that he was good to him. Either way, he embodies the shallowness and conformism of society: he conforms himself to the values professed by his society.

The reference to the Tower of Babel is ominous: it suggests insanity. This reference prepares the criticism of ‘the system’.

The ‘system’ is never qualified or specified: maybe Dickens is thinking not so much one specific system as any system inasmuch as it is a system. Throughout his ‘demonstration’, he uses David as an antithesis.

Dickens writes about the impossibility of criticizing ‘the system’. That is because a system has no outside: it tells one how to think about everything. See also how everybody agrees and shares the same view of things although they occupy different positions (prison director, inmates, journalists).

All other characters are first exposed to ‘the system’ and then observe its results and judge them according to ‘the system’. David, the only sane character, does the opposite. He judges ‘the system’ with an exterior eye and puts facts, not theory, first.

All characters except David behave in a gregarious way, by imitation. David does not join the crowd.

Uriah and Littimer speak in stereotyped formulas, the two of them sometimes use the same.

The ‘system’ uses numbers instead of names: it is dehumanizing.

Imitation entails competition: Creakle and another man compete through Heep and Littimer.