Master Humphrey’s Clock.

DICKENS, Charles.

$1,100.00

Item Number: 147267

London: Chapman and Hall, 1840.

First edition of this classic collection of short stories. Royal octavo, 3 volumes, bound in full calf by Worsfold, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, illustrated with wood-engravings after George Cattermole & Hablot K. Browne. In very good condition, bookplates to the front pastedown.

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. However, the short stories and the novels were published 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.