Hablot Knight Browne worked as Dickens’s principal illustrator for more than 20 years, from the publication of The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) to A Tale of Two Cities (1859). He signed his first illustrations for Pickwick ‘N.E.M.O.’, but thereafter adopted the sobriquet ‘Phiz’, short for ‘physiognomy’, the popular pseudo-science of inferring character from facial features.
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