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) on Hogarth, goes as far as to wrongly attribute the inscription as an excerpt from chapter six. The original painting was bought by George Hay, a prominent civil servant in the Pitt Government, who owned several of Hogarth's works and whose portrait Hogarth had painted in 1757, then passed to a Mr. Edwards, and is now held by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The first and second states along with the inscriptions which accompanied both sold in Baker's 1825 auction of Hogarth's works for £6. 12s. 6d. The picture has some interest to scholars of Hogarth because of its continuation