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.

Here in one passage we have an intimation that Mrs. Dickens had a
temper that was easily roused, that Dickens himself was interested
in an actress, and that Miss Hogarth "had always been in love with