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Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth at the Birmingham Town Hall – the first of his famous readings. Copies for presentation were evidently specially prepared with a heavy text leaf replacing the standard tissue guard. The Gimbel Collection, now at Yale, includes three presentation copies of this edition, each similarly inscribed on an inserted front blank and dated November 1852. Dickens’s Christmas books were published here together for the first time, with a new preface by Dickens. This copy was later in the library of noted collector Carrie Estelle Doheny (1875–1958) with her red morocco book label on the front pastedown. Octavo (180 × 118 mm). Contemporary reddish-brown calf, titles in gilt to green calf spine label, spine elaborately blocked in gilt, frames to covers in gilt and blind, board edges rolled in gilt, marbled endpapers, edges gilt, green silk bookmarker. Housed in a custom red cloth chemise and red morocco-backed slipcase. Engraved frontispiece by John Leech, text in double columns. Spine professionally refurbished, repair to front joint. Auction cataloguing tipped-in at front. Crease to gutter of frontispiece. Slight rubbing to extremities, boards a little marked and scuffed; a very good copy, internally bright. ¶ Gimbel D5. Gordon Morris Bakken & Brenda Farrington, eds., Encyclopedia of Women in the American West , 2003. £60,000 [135836]
signature and 39 plates by Phiz. Recent bookplate of Jeremy & Penny Martin to front pastedown. Neat repair to front joint, spine ends and front free endpaper, superficial split to front joint and inner hinges, some browning and foxing to plates as usual. An excellent copy. ¶ Eckel, pp. 64–5; Smith I, 5. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens , 1990. The letter is published in the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens , vol. I, 1965, p. 603. £50,000 [156959] 35 DICKENS, Charles. Christmas Books. London: Chapman and Hall, 1852 to the young lady with whose family Dickens stayed when he gave the first public reading of A Christmas Carol First authorized collected edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the inserted blank facing frontispiece, “Agnes Sarah Lawrence, from her affectionate friend Charles Dickens, Twenty Second November 1852”. The recipient Agnes Sarah Lawrence (born c .1835, and a young lady at the time of this inscription) was the daughter of John Towers Lawrence of Balsall Heath, near Birmingham. Dickens corresponded with her father in February that year about bringing a group of amateur players to Birmingham. The following Christmas, Dickens returned to Birmingham to give a three-and-a-half-hour reading of A Christmas
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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