Complete Set of Dickens’s Works.

DICKENS, Charles.

$6,500.00

Item Number: 145410

London: Chapman and Hall, 1863-1878.

The Library edition of the works of Charles Dickens. Small octavo, thirty-one volumes, bound in three-quarter navy blue crushed levant morocco over marbled boards by Bayntun Bindery with gilt titles and ruling to the spine in six compartments within raised bands, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers, tissue-guarded frontispiece to each volume, illustrated by Phiz (H. K. Browne), John Leech, George Cruikshank, and others. In near fine condition. Twenty-six of the thirty-one volumes were published during the author’s lifetime, and the final volume, published in 1878, is The Life of Charles Dickens by John Foster. A bright collection.

English writer and social critic Charles Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius. "The Library Edition came about largely because of the suggestion of [John] Forster that while Dickens's works were available in volumes in the Cheap Edition and in reprints of the serial parts, there was no high-quality edition that would appeal to the wealthy. Dickens eventually came round to the idea that an elegant edition could raise the stature of his writings... [It] sold at PS15 for the set, a high price for the time" (Oxford Companion to Dickens).