Great Expectations a reference to a "knowing man", a possible sketch of Bentley Drummle. Another evokes a house full of "Toadies and Humbugs", foreshadowing the visitors to Satis House in chapter 11. Margaret Cardwell discovered the "premonition" of "Great Expectations" from a 25 September 1855 letter from Dickens to W. H. Wills, in which Dickens speaks of recycling an "odd idea" from the Christmas special "A House to Let" and "the pivot round which my next book shall revolve." The "odd idea" concerns an individual who "retires to an old lonely house…resolved to shut out the world and hold no communion with
Letters of Charles Dickens noted that there were some errors and omissions of transcription he endorsed it as being in general extremely accurate, and thought the project as a whole "of incomparable value". New Dickens letters are discovered at the rate of about 20 per year, and they were for some years edited and published in Supplements to the Pilgrim Edition in "The Dickensian", the journal of the Dickens Fellowship. They have also been made accessible online by the Charles Dickens Letters Project, and it is intended eventually to publish a supplementary volume to the Pilgrim Edition. The costliness of both the Nonesuch and