... In his *next novel, Our Mutual Friend, he created the character of Riah (meaning "friend" in Hebrew), whose goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as Fagin's evil...

Morwen: This from the wiki link you give above is not accurate [as wiki entries often are not]: OMF was not CD's '*next' novel, but the last ever published apart from the unfinished Edwin Drood, while OT was the first apart from Pickwick Papers, which many Dickensians regard as more of a series of comic sketches than a true novel. So CD's grief at the offence he had occasioned was not as urgent as to have required the sort of instant atonement the wiki writer seems rather romantically to have foisted on him, but was made after a whole long career, a gap of 26 successful years.

~M~