The New York Public Library, Berg Collection of
English and American Literature

Dickens's Book of Memoranda.
Page 10 of the book of Memoranda. The fourth and fifth entries on this page, both uncancelled and both probably written in the notebook ca. May 1855, may touch directly on Dickens's life. The fourth sketches the predicament of a "misplaced and mismarried man," as we know Dickens felt about himself at this time, who is always "playing hide and seek with the world and never finding what Fortune seems to have hidden when he was born." The fifth describes a woman who "is never married--is always devoted 'to the children' (of somebody else) ... and she has always youth dependent on her 'till her death--and dies quite happily." Forster states, quite plausibly, that this is a portrait of Georgina Hogarth (d. 1917), the utterly loyal "keeper of the flame" who in fact outlived all but two of Dickens's nine children.

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