Books

A Christmas Carol. The Cricket on the Hearth. The Battle of Life; A Love Story. Bound together in a single volume. A Christmas Carol. 166 pages. Lacking title page - The first page present is the colored plate 'Scrooge's Third Visitor.' Followed by the preface, table of contents, and then the first page of the tale. 166 pages. The original ads from the end, if there were any, are gone. Contains 3 hand-colored plates by Leech and 4 black and white illustrations in the text. The plates are, Scrooge s third Visitor, Marley s Ghost, and The Last of the Spirits. Binding is broken. Pages 1-18 are detached from the text block (but attached to each other). Page 19-30 make up another disbound group. Page 31-32 is detached. Pages 33-48 are another disbound signature. All the rest is attached to the large textblock that contains the rest of this story and all of the other two. Without a title page or the advertisements, it is hard to determine exactly which printing this is. The publisher s name, Bradbury and Evans, is printed at the bottom of the final page. Chapman & Hall printed the first printings of the book, so the Bradbury & Evans slug suggests that this is printed after May 1844. A note on the publication history: A Christmas Carol was first printed on Dec 19, 1843 in an edition of 6,000 copies. It was reprinted on January 6, 1844. It was printed 5 more times by the end of May of that year. In June of 1844, Dickens moved from Chapman & Hall to Bradbury & Evans. Bradbury & Evans printed A Christmas Carol in 1846 (presumably from the same plates as the earlier Chapman & Hall editions). Considering that the other Christmas books in this volume are 1846 Bradbury & Evans publications, the best guess is that this is the 1846 printing. That would make it an eleventh printing. Bound with: The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. London. Bradbury and Evans. 1846. First Edition. Engraved title page and vignette. 174 pages. 12 illustrations in the text by Doyle, Leech, Maclise and Stanfield. Previous owners name on the title page Marianne Thesiger. Bound with: The Battle of Life; A Love Story. London. Bradbury and Evans. 1846. First Edition. Engraved title page and vignette. 175 pages. Final page is detached from the text block and still attached to marbled endpaper. All illustrations present. All three books bound together in a single volume. Green leather spine and corners, marbled paper over boards and matching endpapers. Spine strip missing and text block broken into several pieces, as detailed above. Both boards detached but present. 4.75 x 6.5 . Large bookplate on inside front cover Cecil Woods Vest. I have not been able to find any information on him. There is a detached blank page tucked inside the book with the name, Charles W Thesiger, 6 th Dragoons written on it. It s not clear if this is a blank page from one of these volumes or if it s from another book. As noted above, the name Marianne Thesiger is written on the title page of The Cricket on the Hearth. The Thesiger name is a prominent one and it adds interesting provenance to this book. Marianna Thesiger was married to Frederic Thesiger, the Baron of Chelmsford & Lord Chancellor of England (1858-1859). Her second son was Charles Wemyss Thesiger (he of the sixth Dragoons). Charles W. Thesiger was Aide-de-Campe to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, fought in the China War in 1860 and also in the Curragh Brigade. He commanded the Inniskillings (the Sixth Dragoons) from 1868-1878, and was then promoted to the Inspector of Yeomanry Cavalry. He was promoted to Major-General in 1884, became Inspector General of Cavalry in Ireland the next year, and was finally promoted to Lieutenant General in 1891. He died in 1903. It s wonderful to be able to place the book with its original owners & always s delight to discover such a complete biography of those owners on the incredible online resources available to us these days. A wonder.

A Christmas Carol is a novella by English author Charles Dickens. It was first published by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a grumpy, greedy, and cold-hearted old miser who is transformed into a kind, generous man after visits by the ghost of his former business partner and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.