Books

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 the UK in Bentley's Miscellany from February 1837 to April 1839. Before serialization was complete, the full novel was issued in the UK 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 UK 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 the UK 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 UK 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. Two volumes, octavo. Original purple quarter cloth, printed paper label to spines, drab paper-covered sides. Housed in a brown half calf solander box. With 2 pages of preliminary advertisements in vol. I (first state, signed with an asterisk but not "1"), and 16 pages in vol. II (some copies have 12 pages, without established priority). Contemporary ownership signature of one Joseph Hall to front free endpaper of each volume; recent bookplate of collector Peter Russell mounted to inside cover of box. Light sunning to spines, slight wear to labels and corners, contents a little browned and foxed as usual, vol. I a little shaken, pp. 155/6 of same with 80 mm closed tear affecting pagination and headline without loss, pp. 81/2 of vol. II with 81 mm closed tear into text without loss. A very good copy. Gimbel A33; Walter Smith, Charles Dickens: A Bibliography of his First American Editions, 2012, pp. 83-7. See Kathleen Tillotson, "The Philadelphia editions of 1838-9", in The Clarendon Edition of Oliver Twist, 1966.

Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress is Charles Dickens's second novel, and was first published as a serial from 1837 to 1839. The story centers on orphan Oliver Twist, born in a workhouse and sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets the 'Artful Dodger', a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin.