A Tale of Two Cities.

DICKENS, Charles.

Item Number: 15016

London: Chapman and Hall, 1860.

First edition, first issue of one of Dickens’ most enduring work, with p. 213 misnumbered “113,” the signature mark “b” at the foot of the plate list, and the misspelling “affetcionately” on line 12, p. 134. Octavo, bound in three quarters calf over marbled boards, marbled endpapers. Sixteen plates after H.K. Browne including frontispiece and title vignette. In very good condition with some dampstaining to lower right margin, text and plates.

The most famous and possibly the most popular of Dickens's novels, A Tale of Two Cities shows a master of dramatic narrative extracting gold from the ore of history. If the bloody tableau of the French Revolution were not in itself sufficient for a dozen novels, Dickens added to it a professional resurrectionist, an authentic ogress, and an antihero as convincingly flawed as any in modern literature. Here, too, are all of Dickens's recurring themes -- imprisonment, injustice, and cataclysmic violence, resurrection and the renunciation that makes renewal possible.