Mary Hogarth Charles Dickens when Mary was aged 14, on Dickens' first visit to the Hogarth household in Brompton, London. Whilst Dickens and Catherine were courting, Mary was a constant companion and chaperone to both of them. After Charles and Catherine Dickens married in 1836, Hogarth lived with them for a month in a three bedroom apartment at the Furnival's Inn in Holborn, London. From March 1837, Hogarth lived with the couple at 48 Doughty Street, where she helped her sister with household chores, as Catherine was pregnant with her first child. Hogarth was described by those who knew her as "sweet,
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