What wonder that the idea to present Pickwick pictorially should appeal to Robert Seymour and inspire that famous plate, “Pickwick addressing the Club”! This is a happy portrait and has fixed for all time the indelible image of its subject upon the world’s mind. In this matter of pictorial embellishment Dickens’s writings have always held a unique position. Dickens himself preferred to have his works appear unadorned by pictures, but the demand made by his public called into service the most talented pencils from George Cruikshank to Frederick Barnard. Hence, beside the plates for the original editions, we have innumerable engravings for subsequent editions and for special forms of reproduction. Forster, the biographer of Dickens, informs us that rarely, if ever, did anything but disappointment await the novelist so far as the illustrations were concerned; a fact easily determined by tracing the dissatisfaction he evinced through his intimate and friendly intercourse with the pictorial interpreters of his text. The artist of the earlier part of the nineteenth century seldom resorted to the use of the living model in preparing their pictures, and this in no small way accounts for the puppet-like appearance of many of their figures. The only guide was the vivid descriptions of the author, an artist who drew all his inspiration from life. However, in the early sixties there arose a new school of illustrators who lavished the same care upon the preparation of an illustration as a painter does upon his canvases. The result was a series of pictures filled with human interest,—pictures not relying upon exaggeration of details and facial expression to convey their meaning. The only claim that can be made for the early plates as compared to these later ones is their charm of association. Work of men such as Frederick Barnard and Charles Green far surpasses technically these earlier productions and gives to us an interpretation more human and living. In the illustration of the original edition of “Pickwick” we are concerned with three artists, Robert Seymour, Robert Buss, and Hablôt K. Browne, better known as “Phiz.”