F I N E B O O K S & M A N U S C R I P T S
11. The Personal History Of David Copperfield DICKENS, Charles
Bradbury & Evans, 1850. First edition. First state of vignette title page (dated). Pub- lisher’s primary binding of sage green cloth stamped in blind with ruled border and central arabesque to covers and lettered in gilt on the spine. Thirty nine full page steel engravings by H. K. Browne. A very good copy indeed with the spine slightly faded and dusty and a few trivial marks, but the cloth entirely without repair. Internally, generally very fresh with minor, superficial repair to the hinges, pronounced foxing to the frontispiece and engraved title, but the remainder of the plates, for the most part, notably clean. An exceptionally well preserved copy. [40855] £22,500 David Copperfield , described by Dickens as “my favourite child”, marks a step change in the au- thor’s career, a transition from composer of popular, picaresque, comedies to great novelist. It now ranks as one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. Sadleir listed it at the top of his list of comparative scarcities for Dickens in fine condition and we have found it consistently the most difficult of Dickens’s major works to find in good un - repaired cloth. This is due in part to its shape and size. Like all of Dickens’s octavo novels, the contents were simply too bulky for the flimsy binding. With Copperfield this issue was probably exacerbated by its popularity: the serialisation was an instant hit with the public and so when the completed novel was available it was read heavily or rebound for posterity.
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