Dickens evidently drew this idea from a note written earlier in his Book of Memoranda: "Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The two characters, one reporting to the other as he reads. Both getting confused as to whether it is not all going on now!" (21). Boffin and Wegg are reading Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. Dickens had an 1825 eight-volume edition.

In his Companion to Our Mutual Friend, Michael Cotsell notes that "Crude surgery and the Napoleonic Wars meant that wooden legs were not an uncommon sight in Dickens's lifetime" (50). See Cotsell for more on Dickens's possible sources for Wegg's wooden leg. The Companion to Our Mutual Friend. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.