William Hazlitt — sometime painter and philosopher, friend of Keats, political journalist and literary lecturer, greatest theatre critic of the age — was living apart from his wife. For 14 shillings a week he rented rooms in Southampton Buildings off Chancery Lane. His landlady was married to a tailor, Micaiah Walker. Their eldest daughter, Martha, had recently made a very advantageous match to one of their lodgers, Robert Roscoe, son of William Roscoe, the celebrated Liverpool banker and philanthropist whose portrait Hazlitt had painted. A second daughter, Sarah, assisted her mother in the lodging-house, and on 16 August 1820 she brought Hazlitt his breakfast. He fell instantly in love and spent the next three years in emotional turmoil.

Hazlitt’s friend B. W. Procter (aka the writer ‘Barry Cornwall’) did not think well of her appearance:

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