Bleak House.

DICKENS, Charles.

Item Number: 119541

London: Bradbury & Evans, 1853.

First edition of this immensely popular Dickens novel. Octavo, bound in full polished calf with morocco spine label lettered in gilt, elaborate gilt ruling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edged marbled. Illustrated with 38 engravings, frontispiece and pictorial title page by Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”). In very good condition.

"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).