Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1837, first book edition, presentation copy inscribed to Prentis

DICKENS, CHARLES

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. London: Chapman and Hall, 1838

8vo (211 x 133 mm.), FIRST BOOK EDITION, later issue with title page dated 1838, engraved frontispiece (stool with six stripes and signature undivided to left of shield), vignette title page (with "Weller", signed "Phiz fect") and 41 engraved plates by Robert Seymour and Hablot K. Browne ("Nemo" and "Phiz"; corrected states, as usual for book edition, with Chapman and Hall imprints), PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR TO THE PAINTER EDWARD PRENTIS ON THE HALF-TITLE ("Edward Prentis Esquire | From his very sincerely | Charles Dickens"), contemporary maroon morocco, covers with fillets in blind, spine in six compartments lettered in gilt, green endpapers, all edges gilt, some slight spotting to text and plates, minor offsetting and browning, binding rubbed at edges and worn on the spine

The painter Edward Prentis (bap. 1797, d. 1854), brother of the poet Stephen Prentis, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1823, and exhibited at the Royal Society from 1826 until 1850. He painted genre scenes of domestic life, often with allegorical meaning, and his works were accompanied in the exhibition catalogues with quotations from literature. Among the pictures he exhibited at the Society of British Artists were The Nervous Miser (1826), The Wife and The Daughter (1836) and The Folly of Extravagance (1850). His painting The Sick Bed is in the Glasgow Art Gallery. His highly finished drawings of the ivory objects found at Nimrud, Turkish Mosul, were engraved on wood by J. Thompson and published in A. H. Layard's Monuments of Nineveh (1849). 

REFERENCE:

Smith I:3

PROVENANCE:

Prentis, E., authorial presentation inscription