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
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