The Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol; The Chimes; The Cricket on the Hearth; The Battle of Life; The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain.
"The veritable Bible of Christmas": COMPLETE SET OF DICKENS' CHRISTMAS BOOKS, INCLUDING FIRST EDITIONS OF THE CHIMES, THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, THE BATTLE OF LIFE, AND THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST'S BARGAIN
The Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol; The Chimes; The Cricket on the Hearth; The Battle of Life; The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain.
DICKENS, Charles.
$12,000.00
Item Number: 141086
London: Chapman and Hall/Bradbury & Evans, 1843-48.
Complete set of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books. Octavo, 5 volumes, original red cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panels, all edges gilt. A Christmas Carol, in Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas is a fourteenth edition illustrated 4 hand-colored plates and wood-engraved illustrations after John Leech, advertisement leaf at end [London: Bradbury & Evans, 1860]; The Chimes: A Goblin Story, engraved frontispiece and additional title (first state) after Maclise, wood-engraved illustrations by Doyle, Leech and Stanfield, advertisement for tenth edition of A Christmas Carol at beginning, Chapman & Hall, 1845 [1844]; The Cricket on the Hearth, wood-engraved frontispiece, additional title and illustrations by Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise and Landseer, second state of Oliver Twist advertisement at end, Bradbury & Evans, 1846 [1845]; The Battle of Life, wood-engraved frontispiece, additional pictorial title (in fourth state) and illustrations by Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield and John Leech, thin ink splash to upper cover, Bradbury & Evans, 1846; The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain, advertisement leaf at the beginning, wood-engraved frontispiece, additional vignette title and illustrations by Leech, Stanfield, Tenniel and Stone, Bradbury and Evans, 1848. Each volume is in near fine condition. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box by the Harcourt Bindery. All first editions with the exception of A Christmas Carol.
A Christmas Carol "may readily be called the Bible of Christmas. It was issued about ten days before Christmas, 1843, and 6000 copies were sold on the first day"(Eckel, 110). "It was a work written at the height of Dickens’ great powers, which would add to his considerable fame, bring a new work to the English language, increase the festivities at Christmastime, and contain his most eloquent protest at the condition of the poor" (John Mortimer). "Suddenly conceived and written within a few weeks, [A Christmas Carol] was the first of Dickens’ Christmas books (a new literary genre thus created incidentally) it was an extraordinary achievement—the one great Christmas myth of modern literature."
