Master Humphrey’s Clock.

DICKENS, Charles.

$1,400.00

Item Number: 129551

London: Chapman and Hall, 1840.

First edition in book form of this collection of short stories which originally appeared as a weekly periodical of the same name. Large octavo, 3 volumes bound in three quarter morocco by W. Pratt with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, illustrated with frontispieces and almost 200 in-text illustrations by George Cattermole and Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”). In very good condition. From the library of William Waldorf Astor with his bookplates.

Master Humphrey's Clock originally appeared in the form of a weekly periodical, published between April of 1840 and December of 1841. Entirely written and edited by Dickens, the magazine included both short stories and two novels (The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge). Many of the short stories acted as frame stories to the novels, and although Dickens' original artistic intent was to keep the short stories and the novels together, he himself cancelled Master Humphrey's Clock before 1848, and described in a preface to The Old Curiosity Shop that he wished the story to not be tied down to the miscellany it began within. Most later anthologies published the short stories and the novels separately. Chapman and Hall were the first to publish them together in 1840 in three bound volumes under the title Master Humphrey's Clock, which retains the full and correct ordering of texts as they originally appeared.