DICKENS, Charles.

Bleak House.

“A word in earnest is as good as a speech": First Edition of Charles Dickens' Bleak House; Finely Bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe

London: Bradbury Evans, 1853.

$2,500.00

In Stock Item Number: RRB-148214

Custom Clamshell Box (+$450)

* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete

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First edition of this Dickens' classic. Octavo, bound in full calf by Sangorski & Sutcliffe with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, top edge marbled, marbled endpapers, illustrated with tissue-guarded frontispiece, engraved title page, and 39 engraved plates by H.K. Browne. With three key typographical errors called for in the first edition: "elgble" on page 19, line 6; "chair" instead of "hair" on page 209, line 23; and "counsinship" instead of cousinship on page 275, line 22. In near fine condition with light toning. Original cloth covers bound in at rear. Ownership plate to the front pastedown. Housed in a custom marbled slipcase.

"In Bleak House for the first time [society] is seen as an absurdity, an irrelevance, almost a madness. A dark force from which the real people must escape in order to create another society of their own [Dickens] had been preparing for this novel all his life and, despite the calamities which had helped to provoke it in the first place, was even happy while he was writing it It might even be said that Bleak House cured the very malaise which was responsible for its composition" (Ackroyd, 649-50). "The Dickens cosmos, his phantasmagoric London and visionary England, emerges in Bleak House with a clarity and pungency that surpasses the rest of his work, before and after" (Bloom, 311).