My great-great grandfather, Hablot Knight Browne, better known to the world as “Phiz”, was the illustrator of 10 of the novels of Charles Dickens. When I started

work on his biography, I became fascinated by study-ing his images through a magnifying glass and, para-doxically, learnt a great deal about his life as well as his work. A case in point is what I deduced from his images of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. But, first, let me set the scene.

Charles Dickens wisely decided to hire more than one artist for Master Humphrey’s Clock, the weekly miscellany in which The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge appeared. Each issue had a grinding two-week publication lead and required a minimum of two illustrations. As principal illustrators, Dick-ens lined up Phiz and George Cattermole, and kept Samuel Williams and Daniel Maclise waiting in the wings; in the end the latter two drew only one image each for the miscellany. It is hard to be exact about the numbers produced by Phiz and Cattermole – some of the images are unsigned and their subject matter and styles occasionally overlap – but the best estimate is 157 for Phiz and 39 for Cattermole.

George Cattermole (1800-68) was a distinguished artist, 15 years older than Phiz, famous for water-colours, finely rendered architectural drawings and illustrations for books by Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Dickens divided the work between him and Phiz accordingly: Phiz was responsible for people (especially low characters), active moments and comic rascality, while Cattermole embarked on lofty, antiquarian, angelic and architectural subjects.

Dickens was delighted with Cattermole’s designs, but initially did not trust him to transfer them on to the block. For this, he called in Phiz, who traced Cattermole’s images before transferring them. With his own designs, Phiz usually drew in reverse directly on to the specially whitened end-grain of the box-wood block. He signed most of his images HKB or HB, not Phiz, but a few are unsigned. On the title page of the bound edition of Master Humphrey’s Clock,

his name is given as Hablot Browne. The public was unaware that Phiz and Hablot Browne were one and the same, and enjoyed comparing the “rival” artists.

Dickens made the expensive choice to use what he referred to as “woodcuts”, which were actually wood engravings cut into the end-grain of the wood rather than on the plank. They had three great advantages over etchings: they did not break down, even for print runs of 100,000 copies; they were the same height as the raised type face and could be inked and printed simultaneously with the lettering (unlike etching plates which must be wiped and then sent through a rolling press and printed on individual dampened pages); and they could be placed at the exact point in the text to be illustrated and so retained the closest relationship to the story.

With my loupe, I found that Phiz’s Nell breathed a more vibrant breath than Dickens’s earnest “little creature”. With that sexless phrase, which appears twice on the third page of The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens denies Nell’s sexuality from the start. He keeps her, like the memory of his deceased sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, innocent and immaculate, although this does not prevent his characters – Quilp, Dick Swiveller, Kit – from desiring her. In creat-ing Nell, Dickens pickles Mary, immortalising her purity. It is significant that Dickens consistently re-fers to Nell as “the child”, only rarely referring to her as a “little girl”, and never as a “young woman”. Nell is 14. My next door neighbour is 14 and she is not a little girl; nor is she a child. She is a young woman.

But Phiz begs to differ with Dickens. As Michael Steig says: Cattermole’s Nell “is either a wax doll or barely visible, [while] Browne makes us believe in the ‘cherry-cheeked, red-lipped’ child Quilp describes so lecherously.” Phiz’s Nell is a flesh-and-blood ado-lescent with what Diana Phillips calls “that twilight look of half-comprehended sexuality” common to Lewis Carroll’s photographs of young girls.

It was not until chapter six of The Old Curiosity Shop that Phiz had a chance to draw Nell. Until then he had been busy with images of Quilp, Dick Swiv-eller and other low types. By the time his chance

Valerie Browne Lester explains why Phiz’s images of Little Nell convey a story of lechery, desire and sexual awakening – and reveals that this may tell us more about the first rocky year of the artist’s marriage than about Dickens’s heroine

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FOR WHOM DID NELL TOLL?

1 & 2 Phiz’s first image of Nell clearly shows her fear of Quilp

3 Nell continues to look anxious when she meets the schoolmaster

4 A change of expression. Nell in the schoolroom starts to look coquettish

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came, George Cattermole and Samuel Williams had already made their mark. Cattermole complied with Dickens; his Nell is a “little creature”, whom he placed standing primly in the middle of a disturbing but elegantly cluttered shop. Williams’s Nell, how-ever, is distinctly red-lipped and exudes desirability as she sleeps, her hair spread across the pillow.

Williams, an artist and engraver, was the only illustrator of the four to both design and cut an im-age. This allowed him to achieve precisely the effect he wished and makes “Nell Asleep” the most per-fectly executed illustration in the book. All the other images in Master Humphrey’s Clock were hostage to what Phiz referred to as the “relays of woodcutters”: Landells, Gray, Vasey and Williams (who also cut four designs by the other artists).

The fourth illustrator, Daniel Maclise, provided his sole image for The Old Curiosity Shop near the end of the book. It is an arresting and complex picture of Nell and the sexton by the well, much admired and reproduced. The American illustrator Felix Darley admired the Maclise Nell so much that he imported her, complete with well but minus sexton, almost line for line into his Dickens Little Folks series.

Phiz’s first image of Nell with Quilp (fig 1) is a shocker after Williams’s gentle sleeper, and I believe the design arose not merely out of Dickens’s text, but from Phiz’s personal experience. On 28 March 1840, just about the time Cattermole and Williams were designing the first Nells, Phiz got married at Trin-ity Church, Marylebone, at the age of 25. Susannah Reynolds, his 16-year-old bride, was an orphan, the daughter of Abraham Reynolds, a Baptist minister – and I confess to conflating Susannah with Phiz’s Nell. Until I magnified the image (fig 2), I had been mystified about why it took the Brownes nearly two years to produce a child. Susannah later proved to be extremely fertile and the Dickenses had their first baby a mere nine months after their wedding. But this picture suggests that in the first year of marriage Susannah may have been terrified of sex. Look at the distance between the two figures, the anxiety in the face of the young woman and the coarseness of the

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man. The image reeks with sexual allusion: Quilp’s top hat, the umbrella, the empty drawer – and Nell’s voluptuous mouth. Listen to Dickens’s words: “Mr Quilp …[patted] her on the head. Such an applica-tion from any other hand might not have produced a remarkable effect, but the child shrunk so quickly from his touch and felt such an instinctive desire to get out of his reach, that she rose directly and de-clared herself ready to return.” Did Susannah shrink from Phiz this way early in their marriage?

Nell continues to look anxious in Phiz’s next three images of her, and is particularly apprehensive when she meets the schoolmaster (fig 3). But a change occurs as she busies herself with embroidery in the boisterous classroom; there she looks positively coquettish (fig 4). Phiz must be making progress with his wooing. But her anxious look returns in the next image, and then things become much worse.

“Quilp at the Gateway” (fig 5) is arguably the most peculiar image in The Old Curiosity Shop, and with

5 ‘Quilp at the gateway’ is arguably the most peculiar image in The Old Curiosity Shop

6 & 7 In ‘Nell and the waxworks’ and ‘Nell and the gamblers’ she starts to look foxy and curious

8 Dickens describes Nell at Miss Monflathers’ school as crying, but here she looks gorgeous

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good reason. It is not signed and it is tricky to dis-cern which artist executed it because, in a sense, they both did. Dickens wrote to Cattermole that the scene was intended “expressly with a view to your illustri-ous pencil”, presumably because of its architectural interest. But somehow the work landed on Phiz’s desk, although Cattermole prepared a preliminary sketch. (Phiz frequently picked up after Cattermole if the latter was hors de combat as a result of sickness or foot-dragging when asked to tackle a subject that did not appeal, such as the raven in Barnaby Rudge.) At first glance the architecture appears to be pure Cattermole, but on closer inspection Phiz swims into focus. No rolling-eyed, tongue-out, monstrous statues appear in Cattermole’s sketch, no dwarf, no boy, no cowering Nell. This is Phiz’s territory.

If the engraving represents a chapter in Phiz’s sexual wooing of Susannah, he has had a serious set-back. Nell’s eyes are wide with fear, her back is turned to Quilp, she clutches the stonework with a grossly out-of-proportion hand, and her bent and presumably trembling legs are visible through her skirt. The distance between her and Quilp is great, the same distance as in Phiz’s first picture of them. Quilp raises his stick, even though the text has him leaning on it. Phiz expressing frustration?

As in “Quilp at the Gateway”, Phiz’s next two images of Nell, “Nell and the Waxworks” (fig 6) and “Nell and the Gamblers” (fig 7), have her back squarely turned to the men in the pictures, but she does not look frightened any more. In the first (ap-pallingly cut by Landells) she sports a certain foxi-ness; in the second, curiosity. Things are looking up.

Tony Bareham (a specialist in the works of Charles Lever, the Irish author for whom Phiz illustrated 17 books) once remarked that he saw a subcurrent of strong sexuality in Phiz’s work and that Phiz man-aged to turn even Little Nell into a sexpot. I believe he was thinking of this image (fig 8), for here Nell looks absolutely gorgeous. In Dickens’s text she appears at Miss Monflathers’ school where she soon becomes the victim of that lady’s harsh tongue. Dick-ens describes Nell as crying, but Phiz casts her eyes

down and gives her an expression more self-confi-dent than teary. This Nell is a ripe-for-the-picking young woman, radiating half-comprehended sexual-ity. Susannah, facing forward, is coming round.

But what is happening in fig 9? In the text, Nell faints from a combination of exhaustion and the shock of seeing the schoolmaster again. Phiz pictures the moment after the schoolmaster has taken her in his arms and carried her to the warmth of the inn. He leans over her, his arms protecting her, his mouth close to hers. Nell lies back stunned, gazing at him, her lips pursed as for a kiss, her knees wide apart.

In Phiz’s last rendering of Nell (fig 10), she is seated with her grandfather in the cemetery. The old man strokes her head and holds her hand, while her dainty ankle peeks from under her transparent skirt. He mutters to her that “she grew stronger every day, and would be a woman soon”. In the background, Phiz has signed his initials on one of the tombstones, and on the other he has written “AETAT 16.” I take this to be a message that his 16 year-old bride has “died” and become a woman.

You may feel that this essay is subjective and self-indulgent, but eight years of living in a biographer’s straitjacket followed by the liberation of publication have driven me to it. So here’s my conclusion: by magnifying Phiz’s images of Little Nell and study-ing the clues, it is possible to infer that Phiz’s young wife, in a year, moved from being a terrified virgin to a coquette, suffered a reversal of affection, and at last consummated her marriage – an act that I believe occurred just before Phiz drew his astonishingly tri-umphant, phallic image of the death of Quilp.

Phiz and Susannah were happily married for 42 years and produced 12 children before Phiz died in 1882. Little Nell lives for ever, of course, but she is immortal in two forms: as Dickens’s and Catter-mole’s wan little creature, and as Quilp’s and Phiz’s cherry-cheeked, red-lipped, vibrant young woman.

——• 1 •——Valerie Browne Lester is the author of Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens, Chatto & Windus, 2004

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9 Nell faints from shock and exhaustion, but Phiz depicts her more suggestively

10 Phiz carves his initials in the tombstone and writes ‘Aetat 16’ – perhaps a sign that Nell (like his wife) has grown up

“Nell exists in two forms: as Dickens’s and Cattermole’s wan little creature, and as Quilp’s and Phiz’s cherry-cheeked, red-lipped, vibrant young woman”

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