DICKENS, Charles.

£5,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Oliver Twist. First US edition of one of the best-known of all works of English fiction, unrestored in the original quarter cloth.Oliver Twist was first serialized in Britain in Bentley's Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839. Before serialization was complete, the full novel was issued in Britain in book form in November 1838.The publishing history of the first US edition is complicated. Dickens's works did not have copyright protection in the US, to his irritation, and his novels were subject to rapid competing piracies. Lea and Blanchard made a payment of £50 to Dickens, and £60 to his British publisher Richard Bentley, in return for advance sheets of Oliver Twist to gain an advantage over other American publishers.From these advance sheets, Lea and Blanchard issued a separate part serialization, and planned a one-volume illustrated edition, which was indeed the first printed in early December 1838. However, delays in receiving Cruikshank's illustrations from Britain ensured the sheets of the one-volume edition were not published until 2 February 1839. Lea and Blanchard feared their competitors would publish first, pirating copies of the British edition which were making their way over the Atlantic. They quickly printed this two-volume edition, published on 19 December 1838, the title page post-dated 1839.

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