Mary Hogarth beautiful and light-hearted". When Robert Story visited the Hogarth household in 1836, he described Hogarth as "the fairest flower of spring". Dickens showed particular affection to Hogarth, and described her as "a close friend, an exceptional sister, a companion at home." It is believed that Hogarth was the first person to read "The Pickwick Papers" and "Oliver Twist", as Dickens valued Hogarth's input and feedback more than his wife's. In the early hours of 7 May 1837, after Hogarth had returned from a showing of "Is She His Wife?" at the St James's Theatre with the Dickens couple, she collapsed
The Bench (Hogarth) added. Willes' eyebrows, which had been black in the painting, are white in the engraving. The print was accompanied by a second sheet of the same size with a lengthy inscription detailing Hogarth's motives for creating the piece. In a letter to Hogarth, a correspondent identified only as "B" noted that the print seemed of minor importance compared to the inscription, indeed it was the only written work that Hogarth released under his own name after the completion of "The Analysis of Beauty"; Paulson suggests it may have been a rejected passage from that book, and Trusler, a nineteenth-century commentator