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 the most tightly built of his mature novels. Ninety-nine plates, among them Constable's views of Salisbury Cathedral and the Kent watermill at Flatford, carry the marsh country, the river, and the roads of the novel in paint.