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 burned those letters that had been sent to him in a mass bonfire in 1860, commenting, "Would to God that every letter I had ever written was on that pile". He burned more in 1869, the year before he died. As a result, hardly more than 250 letters to Dickens have survived to the present day. The reading public's first chance to study large numbers of Dickens letters came shortly after his death with the publication of "The Life of Charles Dickens" (1872–74) by his lifelong friend John Forster. Many of Dickens's letters to Forster were included, but they were