Uncle Tom's Cabin.

First Cruikshank illustrated edition in book form of Stowe's enormously influential and important work. Octavo, bound in three quarters morocco over marbled boards, elaborate gilt stamping to the spine, morocco spine label lettered in gilt, frontispiece portrait of Stowe, pictorial vignette to the title page, illustrated with twenty-seven wood engravings by George Cruikshank. Praised as the "modern Hogarth" during his lifetime, English illustrator George Cruikshank's book illustrations reached an international audience with the publication of Charles Dickens' Sketches by Boz (1836), The Mudfog Papers (1837–38) and Oliver Twist (1838). "One of the most popular and long-lived [of the numerous editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cruikshank's] twenty-seven whole-page designs, reproduced as wood-engravings, concentrated upon the scenes which were to provide the basic matrix for the majority of subsequent illustrated editions" (Wood, 152). Cruikshank's illustrated edition was issued in the same year as the final installments of the first serialized appearance in the American abolitionist newspaper the National Era and as the first American publication in book form by John P. Jewett & Company in 1852. In very good condition.