to
have been, to supply a kind of connection between the episode and the
story. "I don't see the practicability of making the History of a
Self-Tormentor, with which I took great pains, a written narrative. But
I do see the possibility" (he saw the other practicability before the
number was published) "of making it a chapter by itself, which might
enable me to dispense with the necessity of the turned commas. Do you
think that would be better? I have no doubt that a great part of
Fielding's reason for the introduced story, and Smollett's also, was,
that it is sometimes really impossible to present, in a full book, the
idea it contains (which yet it may be on all accounts desirable to
present), without supposing the reader to be possessed of almost as much
romantic allowance as would put him on a level with the writer. In Miss
Wade I had an idea, which I thought a new one, of making the introduced
story so fit into surroundings impossible of separation from the main
story, as to make the blood of the book circulate through both. But I
can only suppose, from what you say, that I have not exactly succeeded
in this."

Shortly after the date of his letter he was in London on business
connected with the purchase of Gadshill Place, and he went over to the
Borough to see what traces were left of the prison of which his first
impression was taken in his boyhood, which had played so important a
part in this latest novel, and every brick and stone of which he had
been able to rebuild in his book by the mere vividness of his marvellous
memory. "Went to the Borough yesterday morning before going to Gadshill,
to see if I could find any ruins of the Marshalsea. Found a great part
of the original building--now 'Marshalsea Place.' Found the rooms that
have been in my mind's eye in the story. Found, nursing a very big boy,
a very small boy, who, seeing me standing on the Marshalsea pavement,
looking about, told me how it all used to be. God knows how he learned
it (for he was a world too young to know anything about it), but he was
right enough. . . . There is a room there--still standing, to my
amazement--that I think of taking! It is the room through which the
ever-memorable signers of Captain Porter's petition filed off in my
boyhood. The spikes are gone, and the wall is lowered, and anybody can
go out now who likes to go, and is not bedridden; and I said to the boy
'Who lives there?' and he said, 'Jack Pithick.' 'Who is Jack Pithick?