Description

Full-Leather. Fine. First Thus. First English edition and first separate edition in book form. Full calf with leather spine label. Spine label extends most of the length of back-strip with title and author printed vertically. Small bookseller’s label, from Sydney, Australia, inside front cover. Bound with half-title and 8 leaves of adverts as called for at rear. Hotten is the author of the preliminary material about T.G. Wainewright. Dickens had written the story originally for the New York Ledger, which paid him one thousand guineas for the tale. Pubished in 1859 in newspaper form, the tale appeared the a year later in Dickens own periodical publication All Year Round and was reprinted by T.B. Peterson in 1861 in book form, together with “The Lamplighter’s Story”, et alia. Hotten’s was the first individual printing in book form of the tale and the first English edition in book form. Originally published in pale green wrappers, this copy has been rebound in full calf. Interior is clean and free of foxing. An attractive copy of a very scarce edition, even rebound. Podeschi B273; Eckel 198-9.