Famous Affinities of History: The Romance of Devotion. Volume 4Orr, Lyndon
History
Famous Affinities of History: The Romance of Devotion. Volume 4
Orr, Lyndon
Biography; Love; Women -- Biography
In the second set of letters, written long afterward, Mrs. Winter seems
to have "set her cap" at the now famous author; but at that time he was
courted by every one, and had long ago forgotten the lady who had so
easily dismissed him in his younger days. In 1855, Mrs. Winter seems to
have reproached him for not having been more constant in the past; but
he replied:
You answered me coldly and reproachfully, and so I went my way.
Mr. Harper, in his introduction, tries very hard to prove that in
writing David Copperfield Dickens drew the character of Dora from Miss
Beadnell. It is a dangerous thing to say from whom any character in a
novel is drawn. An author takes whatever suits his purpose in
circumstance and fancy, and blends them all into one consistent whole,
which is not to be identified with any individual. There is little
reason to think that the most intimate friends of Dickens and of his
family were mistaken through all the years when they were certain that
the boy husband and the girl wife of David Copperfield were suggested
by any one save Dickens himself and Catherine Hogarth.
Why should he have gone back to a mere passing fancy, to a girl who did
not care for him, and who had no influence on his life, instead of
picturing, as David's first wife, one whom he deeply loved, whom he
married, who was the mother of his children, and who made a great part
of his career, even that part which was inwardly half tragic and wholly
mournful?
Miss Beadnell may have been the original of Flora in Little Dorrit,
though even this is doubtful. The character was at the time ascribed to
a Miss Anna Maria Leigh, whom Dickens sometimes flirted with and
sometimes caricatured.
When Dickens came to know George Hogarth, who was one of his colleagues
on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, he met Hogarth's
daughters--Catherine, Georgina, and Mary--and at once fell ardently in
love with Catherine, the eldest and prettiest of the three. He himself
was almost girlish, with his fair complexion and light, wavy hair, so
that the famous sketch by Maclise has a remarkable charm; yet nobody
could really say with truth that any one of the three girls was
beautiful. Georgina Hogarth, however, was sweet-tempered and of a
motherly disposition. It may be that in a fashion she loved Dickens all
her life, as she remained with him after he parted from her sister,
taking the utmost care of his children, and looking out with unselfish
fidelity for his many needs.
It was Mary, however, the youngest of the Hogarths, who lived with the
Dickenses during the first twelvemonth of their married life. To
Dickens she was like a favorite sister, and when she died very
suddenly, in her eighteenth year, her loss was a great shock to him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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