DICKENS, Charles.

£1,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. First edition, bound from the parts, of one of Dickens's most politically pointed novels. Nicholas Nickleby was written at the end of a turbulent decade, in which the Reform Act and Poor Law Amendment Act had led to widespread unemployment and depression, and published in the year of the first Chartist uprising at Newport. Written after the widespread success of The Pickwick Papers and at the same time as Oliver Twist, Dickens wanted to capitalize on the best aspect of both of these works - the comedy in Pickwick and the social criticism in Oliver. According to Dickens's biographer, "he did not want to lose either his reputation as a topical and polemical novelist or his fame as a comic one. So in Nicholas Nickleby, he devised a plot capacious enough to include both aspects of his genius" (Ackroyd, p. 254).The edition was issued in monthly parts from April 1838 to October 1839, with sheets issued in book form on completion. This is a copy bound from the parts, with stab-holes.Provenance: William Frederick Fownes Tighe (1784-1878), with his contemporary ownership inscription to the title page and his bookplate to the front pastedown. The heraldic device of the Tighe family is in gilt on the top compartment of the spine, identified by the British Armorial Bindings project at the University of Toronto (accessible online). Tighe was first cousin once removed to the poet Mary Tighe, and in 1825 married Louisa Maddelena, daughter of Cha

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