Georgina Hogarth often expressed to her sense of affectionate care and devotion in her home – never more strongly than within the last twelve months. One day in the same year, William Makepeace Thackeray asserted that Dickens's separation from Catherine was due to a liaison with an actress, Ellen Ternan, rather than with Georgina Hogarth as had been put to him. This remark coming to Dickens' attention, Dickens was so infuriated that it almost put an end to the Dickens-Thackeray friendship. With rumours that he and Georgina Hogarth were having an affair circulating, Dickens family history allegedly had it that a doctor's
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