Dickens, Charles

large 8vo (255 x 170mm.), 3 volumes, first book edition, frontispieces, original dark grayish brown bold-ribbed cloth, covers stamped in blind with floral pattern, clock design in gilt in centre, spines elaborately gilt, plain endpapers, edges unmarbled edges, some slight spotting, hinges and joints repaired, minor bumping to corners, otherwise a fine and bright copy;  [together with:] The Uncommercial Traveller. Chapman and Hall, 1861, second edition, original  purple wavy-grain cloth decorated in blind, spine gilt (as in first edition), W.H. Smith circulating library stamp, spine slightly darkened, some slight edge-wear--Grego, Joseph, ed. Pictorial Pickwickiana. Charles Dickens and his Illustrators. With 350 drawings and engravings. Chapman and Hall, 1899, original green pictorial cloth gilt, some slight foxing; 8vo (6)

Arthur Fisher, bookplate

[Smith I:6]

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First book edition of the stories first serialised under the title Master Humphrey's Clock (it had started on 4 April 1840). Since the reclusive old cripple Master Humphrey and his band of story-tellers did not appeal to the public Dickens developed one of Humphrey's adventures into a full-length tale, The Old Curiosity Shop. "The story of Little Nell's wanderings about England with her helpless old grandfather, fleeing from Quilp, a grotesquely hideous, anarchic, and sexually predatory dwarf, is the most Romantic and fairy tale-like of Dickens's novels...By the end of the story's serialization [on 6 February 1841]) the circulation had reached a phenomenal 100,000 copies. Nell's slow decline and eventual (off-stage) beatified death plunged this vast readership into grief and mourning, Lord Jeffrey famously declaring that there had been ‘nothing so good as Nell since Cordelia’..." (Michael Slater, Oxford DNB). This was followed by the first of Dickens's historical novels, Barnaby Rudge, dealing with the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780.