When Dickens came to know George Hogarth, who was one of his colleagues on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, he met Hogarth’s daughters—­Catherine, Georgina, and Mary—­and at once fell ardently in love with Catherine, the eldest and prettiest of the three.  He himself was almost girlish, with his fair complexion and light, wavy hair, so that the famous sketch by Maclise has a remarkable charm; yet nobody could really say with truth that any one of the three girls was beautiful.  Georgina Hogarth, however, was sweet-tempered and of a motherly disposition.  It may be that in a fashion she loved Dickens all her life, as she remained with him after he parted from her sister, taking the utmost care of his children, and looking out with unselfish fidelity for his many needs.

It was Mary, however, the youngest of the Hogarths, who lived with the Dickenses during the first twelvemonth of their married life.  To Dickens she was like a favorite sister, and when she died very suddenly, in her eighteenth year, her loss was a great shock to him.

It was believed for a long time—­in fact, until their separation—­ that Dickens and his wife were extremely happy in their home life.  His writings glorified all that was domestic, and paid many tender tributes to the joys of family affection.  When the separation came the whole world was shocked.  And yet rather early in Dickens’s married life there was more or less infelicity.  In his Retrospections of an Active Life, Mr. John Bigelow writes a few sentences which are interesting for their frankness, and which give us certain hints: 

Mrs. Dickens was not a handsome woman, though stout, hearty, and matronly; there was something a little doubtful about her eye, and I thought her endowed with a temper that might be very violent when roused, though not easily rousable.  Mrs. Caulfield told me that a Miss Teman—­I think that is the name—­was the source of the difficulty between Mrs. Dickens and her husband.  She played in private theatricals with Dickens, and he sent her a portrait in a brooch, which met with an accident requiring it to be sent to the jeweler’s to be mended.  The jeweler, noticing Mr. Dickens’s initials, sent it to his house.  Mrs. Dickens’s sister, who had always been in love with him and was jealous of Miss Teman, told Mrs. Dickens of the brooch, and she mounted her husband with comb and brush.  This, no doubt, was Mrs. Dickens’s version, in the main.

A few evenings later I saw Miss Teman at the Haymarket Theatre, playing with Buckstone and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews.  She seemed rather a small cause for such a serious result—­passably pretty, and not much of an actress.

Here in one passage we have an intimation that Mrs. Dickens had a temper that was easily roused, that Dickens himself was interested in an actress, and that Miss Hogarth “had always been in love with him, and was jealous of Miss Teman.”

Some years before this time, however, there had been growing in the mind of Dickens a certain formless discontent—­something to which he could not give a name, yet which, cast over him the shadow of disappointment.  He expressed the same feeling in David Copperfield, when he spoke of David’s life with Dora.  It seemed to come from the fact that he had grown to be a man, while his wife had still remained a child.