This February installment of ‘The Printed Image’ serves as a belated commemoration of the birthday of Charles Dickens (February 7), by highlighting the work of one of his most frequent illustrators, Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882). Also known by the pen name “Phiz” to complement Dickens’s own moniker “Boz”, Browne illustrated seven of Dickens’s fifteen novels, among them Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities.

Browne’s illustrations for Dickens are represented in Falvey’s Special Collections in two works: a complete set of the original serialization of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby from 1838-1839, and in The Writings of Charles Dickens, a 32 volume set printed by the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published by Houghton Mifflin & Company in 1894.

(Click on the illustrations in this blog post for a larger view.)

“To this faculty of reproducing at will unconscious impressions he owed most of his excellences, together with most of his faults. Careful adherence to fact, and conscientious reproduction of the model and still life, would have resulted in drawing that might have had a great artistic value, but would not have represented Dickens in the slightest degree.” [1]

While Browne was initially apprenticed as a line-engraver to William Finden, he left this apprenticeship to start his own studio with Robert Young, preferring etchings and watercolors for his artistic output. [2] While engraving uses fine tools to create a design on metal or wood, etching is a method where a drawing or design is incised onto a metal plate with acid, allowing for an illustrator’s drawing style to be more readily replicated for the printed page, as a stylus is used to define the areas that will be etched. We can see evidence of this in Browne’s mark-making in the illustrations and in his extensive use of hatching and cross-hatching.

One intriguing aspect that can be found in some of Browne’s illustrations is the use of a “dark plate” method, where a gray tone is used within the background, created using a ruling machine on the plate. [3] This was undertaken partly as a way to control how the illustrations were reprinted; due to the popularity of Browne’s illustrations, publishers would reproduce them through lithographic stones, a practice which displeased Browne. The dark plate method made it nearly impossible for this kind of transfer to occur, thus bringing Browne some measure of artistic control. [4]