Valerie Browne Lester, the great-great-granddaughter of Phiz, was born in England but spent her childhood in the West Indies. Educated at Harvard, George Washington University, and Georgetown University, she is the author of Fasten Your Seat Belts! History and Heroism in the Pan Am Cabin (1995), Giambattista Bodoni: His Life and his World (2015), Marvels: The Life of Clarence Bicknell, Botanist, Archaeologist, Artist (2018), and The West Indian (2019). She died in June 2019.
The first full biography of Dickens's most famous illustrator. Full of his irresistible drawings, it also provides a vivid and colourful picture of the Victorian age.
