Books

First edition, bound from the parts, with all the requisite issue points. The book was among Dickens's favourites, the author writing to John Forster on 2 November 1843 that "I think Chuzzlewit is a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories" (Hartley, Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, p. 126). The book was first published in monthly parts between January 1843 and July 1844 and is the last of Dickens's picaresque novels. Ackroyd, Dickens's biographer, believes it marked "a great change in Dickens's conception of moral characteristics... For the first time Dickens begins to explore the contradictions and difficulties of the contemporary human world; these are no longer figures defined by a single characteristic or animated by the wilful principle of a 'humour', but ones who are seen to change with the changing world, to live and grow" (Ackroyd, p. 392). Octavo (209 x 130 mm). Late 20th-century red crushed morocco by Bayntun Riviere, spine lettered in gilt, compartments decorated in gilt, gilt frame to covers, gilt portrait of Dickens to front cover, facsimile signature to rear cover in gilt, inner dentelles gilt, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Engraved frontispiece and vignette title page (£ sign transposed, no priority), 38 plates by H. K. Browne (Phiz). A few nicks to lightly foxed plates, marginal repairs to a few plates and pages. A near-fine copy. Eckel, p. 71-73; Hatton & Cleaver, p. 138-212; Kremers, p. 79-86; Podeschi A71; Smith I 7. Jenny Hartley (ed.), The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, 2012.