Georgina Hogarth Dickens's brothers, Dickens's own separation from Catherine or his worries over his sons Alfred Dickens and Edward Dickens. What was unusual, however, was the editors' methods: if cuts were made in one letter leaving passages stranded, these passages were inserted in letters of a later date. In the Preface Georgina Hogarth and Mary Dickens stated: "We intend this Collection of Letters to be a Supplement to the "Life of Charles Dickens," by John Forster. That work, perfect and exhaustive as a biography, is only incomplete as regards correspondence; the scheme of the book having made it impossible to include in
The Bench (Hogarth) the art of character painting as the "wild attempts of children". In his own comments on "The Bench" he compared character, caricature, and "outré" to comedy, tragedy, and farce in the theatre. Comedy, which he aligned with character, showed a true view of nature, as nothing was outside reality. Tragedy, which he compared to caricature, heightened reality, exaggerating aspects of its subjects. Farce and "outré" both took this heightening of features to ridiculous extremes. Hogarth scholar Ronald Paulson suggests that by the time he produced "The Bench" Hogarth had become very sensitive to the criticisms levelled at him as a