Hablot Knight Browne, better known as the illustrator Phiz, enjoyed a prosperous collaboration with one of Victorian literature’s brightest lights, Charles Dickens.

Short for “a depicter of physiognomies,” Browne chose the pseudonym “Phiz” to complement Dickens’s pen-name “Boz,” when the two began working on The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The Pickwick Papers were originally intended to be a series of narrated illustrations independent of any novel. The project, dreamed up by the publisher William Hall, was assigned to Dickens, with Robert Seymour as illustrator. Seymour committed suicide two installments into the project. Browne took over with the fourth installment.

This drawing, completed circa 1836-37, shows evidence of the careful consideration Dickens gave, early in his career, to the relationship between text and illustration. His comments suggest an instinct to maximize the comic effect of the written scene with the placement of the candlestick and the blown-out torch. At the same time, Dickens is careful to preserve a certain visual decorum that he knew would have been concerning to his readers.

Dickens’s marginal comments read, at top, “Winkle should be holding the empty candlestick above his head I think. It looks more comical, the light having gone out.” And at bottom: “A fat chairman so short as our friend here never drew breath in Bath. I would leave him where he is, decidedly. Is the lady full dressed? She ought to be. CD.”

The etching of “Mr. Winkle’s Situation When the Door Blew To” was published for the first time in no. XIII of The Pickwick Papers, issued in parts by Chapman & Hall, 1836-1837 (see Gimbel / Dickens +A15).

As mentioned in an earlier post, the Beinecke Library holds an impressive collection of Dickens materials. In addition to original artwork by Phiz and others, researchers can find interesting realia, such as a quill pen and writing slope used by Dickens as he wrote many of his best-loved works. The collection was given to Yale by Richard Gimbel and is described completely in Dickens and Dickensiana: A Catalogue of the Richard Gimbel Collection in the Yale University Library, by John Podeschi (Yale Univ. 1980).