In mechanical excellence the steel etchings in "Bleak House" may, perhaps, be considered as the masterpiece of Mr. Hablot Browne's great capacity in chalcography. In a less mechanical, but more spirited and dramatic, category I place the etchings, in "Tom Burke of Ours."  "Phiz" was at his drollest in the plates to "Martin Chuzzlewit." In the early Dickens fictions the artist so outrageously caricatured his characters that many of than have scarcely the appearance of human beings. He executed some really magnificent etchings (technically speaking) for a weird romance begun by Harrison Ainsworth, but never completed, entitled "Revelations of London." It was published about 1845. One of the plates—a view of a tumbledown house in the Vauxhall-road was almost Rembrandt-like in its power. Hablot Browne must at that period have been about thirty years of age.

Source: The Illustrated London News, No.2254—Vol. LXXXI, Saturday, July 15, 1882, p.55