Bleak House.

DICKENS, Charles.

Item Number: 85312

London: Bradbury Evans, 1853.

First edition of this Dickens’ classic. Octavo, bound in full morocco, gilt title to the spine, raised bands, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt and gauffered to a red and green berry and leaf motif, turn-ins, engraved title, 39 engraved plates by H.K. Browne. In near fine condition. An exceptional example.

"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).