DICKENS, Charles.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Great Expectations. First edition in book form, first impression, of the rarest and most valuable of Dickens's major novels.The novel was serialized in All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861, before publication in book form in three volumes. Patten suggests that the three-volume format, not used for a Dickens novel since Oliver Twist, was chosen to suit the requirements of lending libraries, and notes that 1,400 copies (most of the first impression and over half of the second) were purchased by Mudie.Margaret Cardwell's detailed analysis in Appendices C and D to the 1993 Clarendon edition of Great Expectations proposes that the five impressions were printed sequentially, with minor typesetting changes between each. The five impressions within the first edition were labelled as five separate editions, probably to imply rapid sales. Her list of points has proved helpful in verifying that volumes or leaves from different impressions have not been intermingled in rebound sets.However, it has become clear that her points must be treated with a degree of flexibility. For example, the reading here at volume III, page 192, lines 11–12, is himself very / carefully, which Cardwell identifies as the second state, but which is also the reading in the Bodleian deposit copy and, in our experience, occurs more often than not, even in copies in the original cloth.Most points in all three volumes of this set meet her criteria for the first impression, though there are a few

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.