Dickens's treatment of the theme of young love

I am by no means an expert on the work of Dickens, in particular his early novels, but it seems to me that another breakthrough from Dickens in his late-career novel Little Dorrit (1855 - not the 1860s as I'd guessed in an earlier post) is his treatment and depiction of young men in love. I think, from my limited recollection, that there is relatively little about love and courtship in his earlier novels, until the expansive late novels when he depicts mature love relationships in the great Bleak House. LD followed BH by a few years - w/ Hard Times, a Dickens one-off, and his shortest and most polemical novel - and LD is I think the first serious (albeit at times comic) depiction of young love. At about the 25% point, we get a few parallel chapters about the uncertainties and the heartbreak of young courtship: a deftly handled scene in which the protagonist, Arthur Clennom, visits the Meagles home and is obviously swooning over the young daughter, Pet, when a rival shows up, a crude and self-centered man who seems confident that Pet is in love w/ him - and Dickens has some wry observations about how disturbed and upset Arthur would be "if he were in love w/ Pet." We see and feel the painful hesitation of a man who does not know how to express his feelings and speak for himself, possibly letting the potential love of his life slip away (into a terrible marriage). In a parallel chapter, D depicts the young son of the Marshalsea prison "turnkey" who is in love w/ the eponymous Little (aka Amy) Dorrit - and after an awkward conversation w/ her father he follows LD to a bridge where she stands and sadly contemplates the flow of the stream below her, and he asks permission to speak to her and she, in the most polite but firm words imaginable, tells him that he should leave her alone and forget about ever winning her affection; he walks off in deep, perhaps even suicidal, sorrow (he imagines the words that would be engraved on his tombstone). We get in these two chapters all of the pain and missed connections of youth and love - a new turn for Dickens I think, and a theme he would develop further a few years later in what's probably his finest novel, Great Expectations.