"A CLARITY AND PUNGENCY THAT SURPASSES THE REST OF HIS WORK": FIRST EDITION OF DICKENS' BLEAK HOUSE, HANDSOMELY BOUND

DICKENS, Charles. Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853. Octavo, early full dark green morocco, raised bands, elaborately gilt-decorated spine and boards, all edges gilt. $3000.

First edition, bound from parts, of one of Dickens' most acclaimed novels, with 40 engraved illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), including frontispiece and vignette title page, handsomely bound.

"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). Ten of the 40 plates are Browne's striking "dark plates," deeply etched with a mezzotint-like chiaroscuro contrast (Hatton & Cleaver, 276). Bound with half title. Smith 10. Gimbel A131. Eckel, 79. Podeschi A131. Early gift inscription.

Text generally clean, plates with some embrowning to edges and foxing, as often. Very handsomely bound.