Dickens, Charles | Little Dorrit, first edition in book form

Property from an Important American Collection

Dickens, Charles

Little Dorrit. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857

8vo. Uncut, engraved frontispiece, pictorial title-page, 38 plates after Hablot K. Browne "Phiz," with "Rigaud" for "Blandois" on pp. 469, 470, 472 and 473; light foxing to plates, lacking the white slip on p. 481. Publisher's green cloth, spine gilt; spine sunned, extremities a little bumped. Collector's green morocco clamshell box.

First edition in book form of this beacon of social reform — a fine copy.

Little Dorrit follows the life of the titular protagonist from debtor's prison to riches. Indeed, the theme of being imprisoned for insolvency was especially pertinent to Dickens and one he revisited several times. As a boy, the author was sent to a workhouse when his father was placed into Marshalsea debtors' prison in 1824, a deeply traumatizing experience for twelve-year-old Dickens.

Little Dorrit was called by George Bernard Shaw "a more seditious book than Das Kapital," due to the author's intensive criticism of the government through the darkly satirical Circumlocution Office, Calvinistic Christianity, and the greed that Dickens saw to be rotting society. The reform of the prison system came to be one of Dickens' most wholehearted devotions. Especially relevant to him was the plight of children living in debtors' prison through no fault of their own. Indeed, Dickens' own brothers and sisters had been in this very position. Describing their heart wrenching innocence, he writes:

"With a pitiful and plaintive look for everything indeed...this Child of the Marshalsea and child of the Father of the Marshalsea, sat by her friend the turnkey in the lodge, kept the family room, or wandered about the prison-yard, for the first eight years of her life. With a pitiful and plaintive look for her wayward sister; for her idle brother; for the high blank walls; for the faded crowd they shut in; for the games of the prison children as they whooped and ran, and played at hide and seek, and made the iron bars of the inner gateway, 'Home'."

Thus, Dickens unveils another appalling truth, as he so powerfully did, that was quite literally hidden away by "high blank walls" from the literate society that read his books. This was the last major book published by Bradbury and Evans; following this, Chapman & Hall were Dickens' chosen publishers.

The book was a favorite of Tchaikovsky and Kafka. Kafka sent a copy to Felice Bauer, writing, "Yesterday I sent you Little Dorrit. You know it well. How could we forget Dickens."

REFERENCES:

Eckel, pp.82-85; Smith I:12

PROVENANCE:

J. Clinton (early ownership inscription)