It is a wearisome business to spend a large inheritance from an unknown benefactor. A London lawyer by the queer name of Mr. Jaggers, with a cultivated taste for seventeenth century French erotica and a whaifish little daughter he keeps imprisoned in his Belgravia basement, informs me that I am to become a 'gentleman'. We'll see about that, Mr. Jagger. I know the type - bloodless, effeminate mimsies of an oddly foreign hue, who get up to the most conventional things with the most conventional women in the most vulgar Rococo four-posters. But I thought it best not to irk the sod, and furthermore he keeps buying me expensive luncheons in the very louchest Soho establishments. So I have taken up lessons in boxing, fencing, backgammon, bear-baiting, apple-bobbing and trans-Atlantic slave trading. All such a dreadful bore. (And so drearily conventional.) Unbeknownst to Mr. Jaggers I have been stealing off south o' the river in my spare evenings (Tuesdays, Thursdays and occasionally Sundays) to visit the most sordid brothel in Camberwell, where the women are as filthy as the window panes. A grand, cobwebbed matron of quite impossible age, known to the clientele as Mrs. Havisham, keeps for my fevered pleasure an unpleasant little cockney called Estella with a mouth like a Dundee docker and legs like Westminster lampposts. I think of her now - reclining in a louse-ridden chaise lounge in my rented apartment, smoking a rare opiate from the Hindu Kush - with Great XXXpectations.

Pip, Pimlico, 1835.