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
Rotten and pocket boroughs by the quality of the local beer, instantly raised the small town of Crawley into a borough, giving it two members in Parliament. At the time of the story, in the early 19th century, the place had lost population, so that it was "come down to that condition of borough which used to be denominated rotten." In Charles Dickens' novel "Our Mutual Friend" (1864-1865), Mr. Veneering is elected MP to a borough called "Pocket-Breaches". "Rotten Borough" was a controversial story published by Oliver Anderson under the pen name Julian Pine in 1937, republished in 1989. In Diana Wynne Jones' 2003