en as long in London
and as well known as Norfolk-street itself. A dozen volumes could not
have told more than those dozen pages did. The _Legacy_ followed the
_Lodgings_ in 1864, and there was no falling off in the fun and
laughter.

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.

The publication of _Our Mutual Friend_, in the form of the earliest
stories, extended from May 1864 to November 1865. Four years earlier he
had chosen this title as a good one, and he held to it through much
objection. Between that time and his actual commencement there is
mention, in his letters, of the three leading notions on which he
founded the story. In his water-side wanderings during his last book,
the many handbills he saw posted up, with dreary description of persons
drowned in the river, suggested the 'long shore men and their ghastly
calling whom he sketched in Hexam and Riderhood, "I think," he had
written, "a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and
_being_ dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for
years retaining the singular view of life and character so imparted,
would be a good leading incident for a story;" and this he partly did in
Rokesmith. For other actors in the tale, he had thought of "a poor
impostor of a man marrying a woman for her money; she marrying _him_ for
_his_ money; after marriage both finding out their mistake, and
entering into a league and covenant against folks in general:" with
whom he had proposed to connect some Perfectly New people. "Everything
new about them. If they presented a father and mother, it seemed as if
THEY must be bran new, like the furniture and the carriages--shining
with varnish, and just home from the manufacturers." These groups took
shape in the Lammles and the Veneerings. "I must use somehow," is the
remark of another letter, "the uneducated father in fustian and the
educated boy in spectacles whom Leech and I saw at Chatham;" of which a
hint is in Charley Hexam and his father. The benevolent old Jew whom he
makes the unconscious agent of a rascal, was meant to wipe out a
reproach against his Jew in _Oliver Twist_ as bringing dislike upon the
religion of the race he belonged to.[271]

Having got his title in '61 it was his hope to have begun in '62.
"Alas!" he wrote in the April of that year, "I have hit upon nothing for
a story. Again and again I have tried. But this odious little house" (he
had at this time for a few weeks exchanged Gadshill for a friend's house