SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: A careful search of the registers at Croydon Minster by DAVID MORGAN has uncovered a new and exciting link between the church and Charles Dickens
Looks familiar?: Phiz’s illustration for Dickens’s novel David Copperfield may have been based on the interior of Croydon Parish Church
It has been known for almost 200 years that Charles Dickens, the great Victorian author, initially used the pen name “Boz” when beginning his writing career, with his Sketches by “Boz”, short stories that were originally published in various periodicals between 1833 and 1836 before being gathered together for publication in book form.
And with these stories, and his later novels, there were usually illustrations to help the reader better picture some of the scenes Dickens laid out in his writing.
The accuracy of the illustrations was of the utmost importance to Dickens, as the drawings portrayed the characters just as he envisioned them and gave readers valuable insights about the characters’ personalities and motives, as well as the plot.
Dickens worked closely with several illustrators and engravers during his career, including George Cruikshank and John Leech, and another who adopted a nom de plume of his own: Phiz.
Phiz’s real name was Hablot Knight Browne, and it is under that name that he appears in the registers of what in the 19th Century was known as Croydon Parish Church. For Phiz not only lived in Croydon but he also used his local church for the inspiration of some of his drawings for Dickens’ novels, including David Copperfield.
The Browne family lived in Thornton Heath and have four separate entries in the baptismal registers: in 1847, Charles and Walter; in 1850, a daughter Emma; in September 1852 another daughter Eliza; in September 1856 Thomas and Mabel.
Great writer: 10 of the novels of Charles Dickens were illustrated by Phiz
It was not unusual for families to baptise more than one child at a time, although this could result in errors in either remembering or recording, accurately, the correct date of birth.
It was not unusual, either, for the occupation or trade column listing the parents’ jobs to alter over time. The head of this early Victorian Browne family was first recorded as “gent”, then as “esquire”, next as “painter” and finally, in 1856, as “artist”.
Hablot Browne stands out in the registers because he is the only person recorded in the history of the church with that distinctive first name. Hablot.
The name came from the surname of a French officer who was killed either in preliminary skirmishes or in the Battle of Waterloo itself in June 1815. The soldier was engaged to marry Kate Browne, the eldest of 14 children in the Browne family. When baby No14 was born that summer of 1815, he was given his sister’s fiancé’s surname as a sentimental gesture, a common practice of the era.
Directory entry: the 1851 volume listing businesses in the area lists Hablot Browne as an ‘engraver’
As he grew into adulthood, Hablot Browne didn’t often use his own name for his artistic work. He chose “Phiz” to compliment Dickens’s nom de plume of Boz, and would illustrate 10 of the author’s 15 novels.
Browne/Phiz was working closely with Dickens by the time he was in his early 20s, even going on holiday to Belgium with Charles and his wife, Catherine, in 1837, before travelling with the author to Yorkshire to research the state of schools there for the next novel, Nicholas Nickleby.
A book, Phiz and Dickens as they appeared to Edgar Browne, written by Browne’s son, reveals much about the illustrator’s career, together with observations of life in Croydon in the middle of the 19th Century.
Edgar Browne tells of how his family moved to the village of Thornton Heath, just outside the market town of Croydon, because of the poor health of his mother, Suzannah. The fresh country air they found south of London proved so beneficial to Suzannah’s health that she changed from somebody who needed looking after to someone who looked after everyone else.
Edgar remembered how some of the family would drive into London, passing through Streatham and Brixton in a pony and trap, leaving it in a livery stable south of Southwark Bridge.
The Browne children were always excited to travel up to London Bridge on a train, but not one pulled by a locomotive but one propelled by atmospheric tube. This was a period of great excitement over scientific discoveries and industrial progress, with the Great Exhibition in 1851 celebrating all aspects of Britain’s growing Empire. Croydon might have had a place in transport history if that propulsion method turned out to be a lasting success, but issues with the reliability of the machinery saw the Victorian investors opt for steam railways.
Phiz had shown a great aptitude for art when he was young.
He began his working life as an apprentice at Finden’s, who were then the leading workshop for engraving, producing high-quality plates for a whole range of books. In 1833, 18-year-old Hablot Browne won a medal, presented by the Society of Arts, for the best etching of an historical subject.
Leading engraver: Hablot Browne, ‘Phiz’, drawn in his later years
Another Finden apprentice, Robert Young, struck up a lifelong friendship with Browne. The two of them left Findens and set up their own business. They rented a work space at 3, Furnival’s Inn, Holborn. Unknown to them, Charles Dickens was renting No15.
It was in 1836 that Browne first met Dickens. The author, then 24 and not yet well known, was writing Pickwick Papers and publishing it in episodes in a pamphlet entitled Sunday under Three Heads.
Pickwick Papers, with its episodic serialisation, has been said to have “revolutionised” British publishing. Dickens’s novels would go on to be among the most read, and most influential, in literature.
Dickens initially used Robert Seymour to illustrate the story. Seymour, an experienced and capable artist, completed seven plates. But Seymour then committed suicide.
With no obvious replacement in mind, Dickens turned first to Robert Buss. That partnership didn’t work out successfully so Dickens advertised for a new illustrator. Two people brought their work for inspection, one was Browne and the other was an illustrator named William Makepeace Thackery.
Browne was chosen, and Thackery went off and wrote Vanity Fair.
For the first two plates which he etched for Dickens, Browne signed himself “Nemo”, but changed to Phiz on the third. It stuck.
On their 1838 research trip to the north of England, Browne and Dickens also travelled across to the industrial areas of Manchester, where they came across two important people in the mills, the Grant brothers. From that meeting evolved the characters that Dickens named the Cheeryble brothers, the elderly twins who employed Nicholas Nickleby.
While the Browne family lived in Thornton Heath, “The Governor”, as Edgar referred to his father, would retire after breakfast to the studio he had set up in their house. He worked long hours, often needing persuasion to take a break even to eat.
Church inspiration: Croydon Parish Church, as it was before its great fire, and which is believed to have been used by Phiz as the basis for one of his drawings in David Copperfield
His business partner, Robert Young, would send down the steel plates in specially constructed boxes. Young would supervise the wax being put on one side, ready for etching. Once received, Browne would etch the plate and send it back to Young together with the sketch. The plate would then be “bitten”, immersed in acid and the exposed metal produce incised lines. Any lettering would be completed by an assistant.
Preparatory work: one of Phiz’s early sketches of the church scene, with the Croydon pulpit influential
Young organised the work so that as one plate was being bitten another would be being etched by Browne, so that the business could keep up with the exacting demands placed upon them when working for one of the most popular writers in the country.
Edgar Browne recalled that Young visited his friend virtually every Sunday, and often during the week as well, with messengers and carriers taking the boxes back and forth between Thornton Heath and the City of London.
David Copperfield was among the many great successes of the Boz and Phiz partnership. The novel was read by a huge audience and the illustrations provoked much emotion. One of those illustrations produced by Phiz was “Our pew at church”. The scene was one of his specialties, combining both architecture and people.
The stone walls of the church are crowded with monuments and memorial tablets, mingling the dead and the living. In his book, Edgar Browne makes the most amazing revelation about the picture: “The architecture of the church is not strictly according to the rules of any style in particular but is an excellent impression of a general view of Croydon Church.”
All those times that Browne came to the church for his children’s baptisms, his artistic eye was scanning the interior. When he needed a church scene for one of his illustrations, he recalled what he had seen and used it as creatively as he needed. Comparisons between the church drawn by Phiz and the prints of the old Croydon Church can clearly show the features he used, particularly the pulpit.
Dickens had other Croydon connections and collaborations, too. John Hullah, who was appointed Croydon’s church organist in 1837, composed the music for the operatic burletta The Village Cocquettes, while Dickens wrote the libretto.
None lasted so long, nor was as close, as the working relationship between “Boz” and “Phiz”.
Sketches by Boz: and later etchings by ‘Phiz’
But after 23 years of working together, Browne and Dickens’ partnership came to an abrupt and somewhat bitter end after the publication of A Tale of Two Cities, with the writer opting to use other illustrators.
There’s a suggestion of some professional rivalry, with Phiz having undertaken some illustration work for rival author Anthony Trollope.
Browne wrote of “Dickens’s strangely silent manner of breaking the connection”.
In 1860, shortly before the publication of Great Expectations, Browne told Young, that, “I have been a ‘good boy’ I believe. The plates in hand are all in good time, so that I do not know what’s ‘up’ any more than you.
“Dickens probably thinks a new hand would give his old puppets a fresh look, or perhaps he does not like my illustrating Trollope neck-and-neck with him — though, by Jingo, he need have no rivalry there! Confound all authors and publishers, I say. There is no pleasing one or t’other. I wish I had never had anything to do with the lot.”
Later editions of A Tale of Two Cities were illustrated by “new hands”, different artists, but in the one and a half centuries since, it has been Phiz’s plates that have been most commonly chosen to accompany Dickens’s text.
Up in Ladbroke Grove, there is an English Heritage blue plaque on a house where Browne lived later in life, between 1874 and 1880.
Most of his best-remembered work, though, will have been etched through wax in his studio in his family’s cottage off the London Road in Thornton Heath. Phiz is surely another Croydon cultural figure who needs to be celebrated and remembered, and it is long overdue for Hablot Browne’s time in Croydon to be properly commemorated.
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- Minster archive reveals butchers, bakers and… peruke-makers
- Dutch courage of brewer who brought his beer to Croydon
- Hymns and arias: Whitgift’s key role in Bible’s Welsh translation
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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