Two Charles Dickens First Editions, "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Dombey

Western Europe, England, Victorian period. Two first editions in book form of novels by Charles Dickens: "Nicholas Nickleby," published by Chapman and Hall in 1839, and "Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation," published by Bradbury and Evans in 1848. Bradbury and Evans printed both books at Whitefriars, London, and each was issued after the novel finished its run in monthly parts. Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz") etched the illustrations in both, and the "Nickleby" frontispiece is by Thomas Onwhyn. Each volume runs xvi + 624 pages. Although the novels came out nine years apart, the Monastery Hill Bindery of Chicago later bound them as a matching pair, and each book carries the bindery's stamp. Both are in full grained crimson morocco with raised bands and gilt spine titles. Their page edges are gauffered, gilt, and painted with trailing garlands of red berries and green leaves. Mr. Dombey, whose firm traded "for Exportation," would surely have approved of the trip. "Nicholas Nickleby," Dickens's third novel, grew out of fieldwork. Early in 1838 Dickens and Browne traveled into Yorkshire to see the notorious cut-rate boarding schools for themselves. The result was Dotheboys Hall, where Wackford Squeers presides over thin porridge and a thick cane. Browne's etchings follow Nicholas from that schoolroom to the traveling theater company of Vincent Crummles and on to the counting houses of London. This copy is a mixed issue of the first edition. It keeps the early misprints "flys" at p. 245 and "visiters" at p. 272. In place of the authorized Maclise portrait, the frontispiece is an etching by Thomas Onwhyn, whose unauthorized "Nickleby" plates Dickens had dismissed in 1838 for their "singular Vileness." Crummles would surely have cast this gatecrasher as the villain. By Dickens's own account, "Dombey and Son" is a novel about Pride. This copy is an early issue full of small typographical slips: "Delight" at p. 284 where later printings read "Joy," "Capatin" on the last line of p. 324, and a missing "if" at p. 426. Browne etched all the plates. In both the vignette title and the plate at p. 238, Captain Cuttle wears his hook on the left arm, an error corrected in later printings. The volume also contains "On the Dark Road," the first of Browne's so-called dark plates, where a machine-ruled tint turns Carker's flight into a night scene. The Monastery Hill Bindery was the family firm of Ernst Hertzberg, a German-born binder who came to Chicago as a teenager. He named the workshop after the monastery ruins above his native Gramzow. Item # 205566

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