Home › By Charles Dickens › By Charles Dickens: Boffin

By Charles Dickens: Boffin

The story of that find was to be talked about in drawing-rooms; in dingy homes along the waterside and in the comfortable bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters; in the musty shop of Mr. Venus where skeletons leaped out of corners as the fire brightened; in Boffin's Bower, behind which rose the dust-mounds that had created the Harmon fortune. For the body was identified as that of John Harmon, returning to England to claim a fortune of $500,000, left him by an eccentric father upon condition that he wed a girl whom he had never seen.

John Harmon was decreed dead and the fortune came to Nicodemus Boffin. He remained the same unaffected and lovable man he had been in the past when he was foreman in charge of the dust-heaps. They were singularly happy, were Mr. and Mrs. Boffin. Men and women laughed at their oddities, but never with malice. Commonplace as they were, there was a sterling worth to them. Eager to atone for his lack of schooling, Mr. Boffin hired Silas Wegg, wooden-legged vender of sweets and ballads, to read aloud Gibbon's story of Rome. His eyes popped with astonishment as Wegg plowed stolidly ahead making sad havoc of Roman names. "I didn't think there was half so many Scarers in print," Mr. Boffin muttered, sagely.