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
Hogarth Club suggested that the club be named after William Hogarth since Hogarth was "a painter whom he deeply reverenced as the originator of moral invention and drama in modern art". Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had worked on some previous independent exhibitions, but became determined to form a permanent exhibition space after the rejection of Pre-Raphaelite work by the Academy in 1857. In response they created their own exhibition, later founding the Hogarth Club in tandem with other sympathetic artists, most notably William Holman Hunt and John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. Despite initial success, the Hogarth Club failed to maintain its momentum,