Charles Reade was laboring over the early numbers of Very Hard Cash in July 1862 when he found the first installment of George Eliot’s Romola in the Cornhill. He reached two immediate conclusions about her new novel: first, that he could “see no trace of George Eliot in the story,” though the Cornhill had advertised the work as hers; and second, that she must have founded Romola upon his own novel of Renaissance Italy, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), which had succeeded critically and commercially the prior year. “Is it egotism,” he wrote to his friend Laura Seymour, “or am I right in thinking that this story of the fifteenth century has been called into existence by my success with the same epoch? If it is Georgy Porgy, why then Lewes has been helping her! All the worse for her. The grey mare is the better horse.”