utiful. 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, t