Dealings With the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation.

DICKENS, Charles.

Item Number: 118053

London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848.

First edition in book form of Dickens’ classic tale of the fortunes of the Dombey shipping firm, following the publication in serial form from September 1846 to March 1848. Octavo, bound in full morocco by Sangorski and Sutcliffe with morocco spine labels lettered in gilt, elaborate gilt ruling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, triple gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, ribbon bound in. Illustrated with thirty-eight plates, tissue-guarded frontispiece and title page vignette by Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”). With the often-missing half-tile present and the original typed invoice from J. Sangorski and G. Sutcliffe Bookbinders dated January 3rd 1934 laid in. In fine condition. Housed in a custom marbled slipcase. A superior example, with noted provenance.

Dickens' Dombey and Son is "now recognized as one of the greatest of all his works. It is also the first one to have an explicitly contemporary setting" (ODNB). The work "has a sense of the numinous, is more profoundly touched by the sense of last things, than any of Dickens' previous novels. It is larger in conception, so that human life is seen in terms of its beginning and its end, so that grief and forgiveness become more powerful forces within it… Dickens is aware of its status as art and provides here a simulacrum of human life touched by majesty and purpose" (Ackroyd, 526). The original serials contain the first of Browne's "dark plates" ("On the dark Road," in part 18), created by the engraver's lining machine and roulettes that tint the etched plate, creating heightened contrast (Johannsen, Phiz, 309).