A boy is frightened into feeding an escaped convict on the Kent marshes, is later summoned to play in a house where the clocks stopped at twenty to nine, and in due course comes into money from a source he is forbidden to ask about. Dickens wrote it weekly to rescue a failing magazine, and changed the ending after Bulwer-Lytton read the proofs and objected. It is one of the shortest of his mature novels and the most tightly built. Thirty-eight plates of forges, frosty mornings and river light by painters including J. M. W. Turner and Joseph Wright of Derby carry the marsh country and the blacksmith's trade through the text.