Bleak House.

DICKENS, Charles.

Item Number: 145476

London: Bradbury Evans, 1853.

First edition of this Dickens’ classic. Octavo, bound in three quarters morocco over marbled boards, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, all edges marbled, marbled endpapers, illustrated with frontispiece, engraved title page, and 39 engraved plates by H.K. Browne. With three key typographical errors called for in the first edition: “elgble” on page 19, line 6; “chair” instead of “hair” on page 209, line 23; and “counsinship” instead of cousinship on page 275, line 22. In very good condition with light rubbing to the extremities, spine, and boards, and light toning to the front and rear pastedown, front and rear free endpaper.

"In Bleak House for the first time [society] is seen as an absurdity, an irrelevance, almost a madness. A dark force from which the real people must escape in order to create another society of their own [Dickens] had been preparing for this novel all his life and, despite the calamities which had helped to provoke it in the first place, was even happy while he was writing it It might even be said that Bleak House cured the very malaise which was responsible for its composition" (Ackroyd, 649-50). "The Dickens cosmos, his phantasmagoric London and visionary England, emerges in Bleak House with a clarity and pungency that surpasses the rest of his work, before and after" (Bloom, 311).