On 14 August 1842, the London novelist Charles Dickens wrote to his friend the Cork artist Daniel Maclise from his summer retreat at Broadstairs in Kent, mock-pleading with him to come to the seaside. He reminded him of the bracing nature of the sea air, and the more particular attractions of a bather whom Dickens and his male friends called ‘the Screamer’:

The Screamer has been identified by Dickens's editors as either a Miss Collins or a Miss Strivens. According to Fintan Cullen, Maclise admitted in a letter to Dickens's biographer John Forster that she was the model for The Origin of the Harp, a painting exhibited earlier in 1842 in the Royal Academy and later at the great Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857. It is currently in the collection of Manchester City Art Gallery (see Figure 1).

The painting is a pictorial representation of Thomas Moore's song ‘The Origin of the Harp’, first published in the third number of his Irish Melodies in 1810. In this lyric, the harp is described as metamorphosed out of the body and hair of a siren who has been abandoned by her lover. Viewers of the picture in 1842 would know that the harp was the Irish national instrument, indeed the symbol of the nation – even if the picture itself is less than explicit on that national subject.