Mary Hogarth Dickens' first child was named Mary in her memory. Hogarth was the daughter of George Hogarth (1783–1870), a music critic, cellist and composer, and Georgina Hogarth Thompson (1793–1863). She was born in Edinburgh, where her father was a legal advisor to Walter Scott, whom the young Charles Dickens greatly admired. She was the fourth of ten children, and the third daughter. Hogarth was named after her paternal grandmother. The name Mary Scott had previously been given to George and Georgina's third child, born 1817 or 1818, who was an infant when she died. Mary and her sister Catherine first met
William Hogarth a truthful, vivid full-length portrait of his friend, the philanthropic Captain Coram for the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, now in the Foundling Museum, and his unfinished oil sketch of a young fishwoman, entitled "The Shrimp Girl" (National Gallery, London), may be called masterpieces of British painting. There are also portraits of his wife and his two sisters, and of many other people, among them Bishop Hoadly and Bishop Herring. For a long period of his life, Hogarth tried to achieve the status of history painter, but had no great success in this field. Examples of his history pictures are