The couple moved into the corner house where Pieter Bohn conducted his business, in the city centre at the point where Grote Houtstraat crosses one side of the Verwulft (square).

Only with the birth registrations for the youngest two children was the pattern broken: François en Martinus were both registered as Mennonites.

[2][3] Only after Dora's death, when the second edition appeared in 1870, did the book incorporate an introduction by Nicolaas Beets in which he disclosed that the author, Dorothea Bohn-Beets, had been his sister.

In February 1862 Dora Beets wrote her brother a letter in which she confided how "... in that book I have set out the innermost outpourings of my own heart in all their variety, and all sorts of mouths have given voice to my own beliefs and confessions".

[2][a][2] In Onze buurt, Dorothea Bohn-Beets describes mid-nineteenth century city life with its relatively fixed hierarchical structure, the houses of the upper and lower middle-classes and the charitable undertakings by citizens and their wives seeking to alleviate the screaming poverty in the city.

A commentator explains that without some sort of didactic idealisation, a Dutch novel of this period could not exist, because it would carry no useful message.