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.