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
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