South Bend news-times. (South Bend, Ind.) 1913-1938, 1914-03-04
TELLS Of EARLY
LIFE OF DICKENS
Mrs. Marian A. White of Chi
cagO Gives Interesting Talk.
Her Parents Were Used as
Characters by Author.

Mrs Marian A. White of Chicago.
a woman whose mother and father
Charles Dickens portrayed in one of
his immortal works, was honor guest
Tuesday afternoon at a charming re-
ception given by Mrs. Frank L. Her
ing at her home, 919 r. Jefferson
boulevard, and for an hour held the
close attention of group OF women
with her personal "reminiscences OF
the author.
Herself an authoress and a recOg-
nized art critic, Mrs. Whites talk
combined several interesting features.
Her first manuscript, written when a
young girl, was edited by William
Nakepeace Thackeray. She is the
publisher of four books on art sub
iects and a contributor to current
publications. Her memory Of the
several times when she met Dickens
in her fathers house as a child and a
young woman, are well defined and
she related them in an animated and
charming manner which added great
~ TO their natural interest.
Gives Feeling OF Intimacy.
AS she expressed the hope of do
ing. in her opening remarks, Mrs.
White left her hearers with feeling
OF lnllHldle with DiShNiAs'
which no autobiography could convey.
She began by telling briefly what she
knows of Dickens parentage in her
desire to disprOVe the American be-
lief that he was low born.
His father" said Mrs. White, was
for a time in the employ OF the Eng
lish naval office, a fact in itself which
proves that the man was gentleman
born. as no other class is admitted to
afa11 "
however, the family was most unfor-
tunate and the picture of his parents
in the debtors prison, which Dickens
draws in David Copperfield, is based
on fact. They were in prison, how
ever, only because Of unfortunate cir
cumstances and not because of any
wrong doing.
Exposed Abuses.
ut is probably his association with
people of the class with which he was
thrown because of his poverty that
the first writer to think the poer
worth writing about and the first
writer to dare TO expose the abuses
which he saw"
II was as a small child in her
fathers house in southern Surrey that
Mrs. White first saw Dickens. 1t is
her father, DIR. Ainsworth. that Dick
ems pictures as Allen WOodcOurt IN
BLEAK House" and her mother is the
Esther Summerson OF the same book.
Esther" was her mothers middle
name and many characteristics of her
mother Mrs. White recognized readily
in the Esther Of the book.
Had it not been for The English
custom of restricting children to the
nursery and the school room instead
of giving them the freedom Of the
house that American children have,
Mrs. White would have seen Dickens
much oftener than she did. AS il was,
many of the times she did see him it
was only by stealth
Hearing voices in her fathers study
one day when she was lonely in the
nursery she slid softly down the ban
nisher and peeping into the room she
beheld a stranger striding up and
down before the study hearth loudly
singing to her father a song about
the Missouri which rolls majestically
down to the sea-, which, he explained
he had learned in America. She
dared not enter The study as she had
come down stairs without permission,
so her first glimpse of the author was
a fleeting one.
The next time she saw him she en-
tered her fathers study with an in
jured thumb and this stranger with
the curly brown hair and wavy beard
entertained her with fairy tales while
her father lanced and bandaged the