Dickens charles

8vo., First Collected Edition, First Issue, with engraved frontispiece, engraved and printed titles and 38 engraved plates by Cruikshank, all plates heavily toned at margins (not affecting engraved images which in many cases are surprisingly clean), some light offsetting from plates to facing pages; nineteenth-century dark green half calf, cloth sides, back with four raised bands ruled and tooled in gilt, marbled endpapers, backstrip faded (but all lettering wholly legible), corners mildly bruised, short pull at head of backstrip, a very good, tight copy. FIRST SINGLE VOLUME COMBINED EDITION. Complete with half-title which is often missing, and 24pp publisher's catalogue dated November 1846 bound in at end. 'This collection of short pieces contains the earliest of Dickens' work. It is undoubtedly the most valuable from the antiquarian's point of view, containing references and descriptions of life in the 30's to be found nowhere else' (Hayward, p.141). 'When Chapman & Hall obtained the copyright of Sketches [from Macrone] in 1837 they published all of them in twenty monthly parts from November 1837 through June 1839. Cruikshank designed a cover, enlarged the plates (save 'The Free and Easy' which was discarded) and created thirteen new illustrations for these monthly parts. In May 1839 Chapman & Hall published these parts complete in one volume with all forty of Cruikshank's illustrations' (Smith, p.16). The title-vignette is supposed to portray Dickens and Cruikshank; the plate 'Public Dinners' (facing p.176) is drawn to include Dickens, Cruikshank, Chapman and Hall (see Eckel pp.13-14). This is the First Issue, with p.526 (the final page of text), l.18 having the words 'reeledbefore' run together and all plates following p.120 with publisher's imprint at bottom. This is also the first impression with the publisher's address reading '186, Strand'. A fresh, tight, textually clean copy. Cohn, 234; Eckel 15-22; Gimbel A7; Hatton & Cleaver, p.103; Jerrold, p.364.