ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens, making the most of the talents available to him for the weekly illustrations, assigned the older artist antiquarian and architectural scenes, and the younger Hablot Knight Browne character and action scenes. Browne for a shilling for Pickwick in April 1836, Dickens and his canny publishers appealed to a burgeoning readership that included those literate consumers with too little disposable income to manage the annual fee of a Guinea commanded by the average lending library. Soon, however, he became Phiz', an artistic name well suited for the creator of phizzes' delightful, effervescent draughts of humour and caricature, as seen in the third plate of Pickwick. As is typical of Barnard and was not at all typical of Phiz, Micawber in the Household Edition even appears by himself. Barnard humanized the types provided by earlier illustrators, as J. Don Vann remarks, strip of the eccentricity which tended to emphasize the author's own trick of symbolic hyperbole.
