First edition in book form. Octavo (5 1/4 x 8 3/16 inches; 134 x 208 mm). [v]-xiv,[1, errata], [1, blank], [1]-624 pp. With engraved frontispiece, engraved title-page and thirty-eight plates. Also with two original pen-and-ink drawing by Browne inserted, each signed "Phiz." The original drawings are inserted facing their respective plates, page 40, "The Christening Party" and page 539, "Mr. Carker in his Hour of Triumph." This second plate is titled in manuscript at the bottom. Each drawing is on a sheet of onion skin measuring 138 x 110 mm and then inlaid into a larger sheet to match the size of the other leaves. Original drawings for first editions of Dickens books are extremely rare. The original front wrapper for part ix bound in at the end. Without the half-title and list of plates.

Full olive morocco, bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe. Boards decoratively stamped in black. Gilt lettering on the spine. Gilt ruled dentelles. Marbled endpapers. Top edge gilt. With two previous owner's bookplates on front pastedown "Kenyon Starling" and "Self". Spine lightly sunned. A near fine copy.

Hablot Knight Browne was born on July 12, 1815, to a family descended from Huguenot refugees who had settled in East Anglia, England in the seventeenth century. The ninth son and thirteenth of their fourteen children, he was christened Hablot in memory of a French officer to whom one of his sisters had been engaged and who had been killed at Waterloo a month before the artist was born. Upon leaving school, Browne became an apprentice with the engraver Finden, where he received a standard grounding in draughtsmanship, copying and drawing. In 1836 he became the third and final illustrator for the first edition of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, and was to continue to illustrate most of the major novels for Dickens through the 1859 A Tale of Two Cities. He became paralyzed in 1867 and moved to Brighton in 1880, where he died in 1882.

John Buchanan-Brown, Phiz; Gimbel. Hatton and Cleaver,. Smith, Dickens,.

HBS # 64542 $16,500