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.
It was believed for a long time—in fact, until their separation—that Dickens and his wife were extremely happy in their home life. His writings glorified all that was domestic, and paid many tender tributes to the joys of family affection. When the separation came the whole world was shocked. And yet rather early in Dickens's married life there was more or less infelicity. In his Retrospections of an Active Life, Mr. John Bigelow writes a few sentences which are interesting for their frankness, and which give us certain hints:
Mrs. Dickens was not a handsome woman, though stout, hearty, and matronly; there was something a little doubtful about her eye, and I thought her endowed with a temper that might be very violent when roused, though not easily rousable. Mrs. Caulfield told me that a Miss Teman—I think that is the name—was the source of the difficulty between Mrs. Dickens and her husband. She played in private theatricals with Dickens, and he sent her a portrait in a brooch, which met with an accident requiring it to be sent to the jeweler's to be mended. The jeweler, noticing Mr. Dickens's initials, sent it to his house. Mrs. Dickens's sister, who had always been in love with him and was jealous of Miss Teman, told Mrs. Dickens of the brooch, and she mounted her husband with comb and brush. This, no doubt, was Mrs. Dickens's version, in the main.
A few evenings later I saw Miss Teman at the Haymarket Theatre, playing with Buckstone and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews. She seemed rather a small cause for such a serious result—passably pretty, and not much of an actress.