Description
“WIDELY HELD TO BE HIS MASTERPIECE”: VERY RARE SPECIALLY BOUND PRESENTATION FIRST EDITION OF DICKENS’ BLEAK HOUSE, BOLDLY INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY DICKENS TO A CLOSE FRIEND
DICKENS, Charles. Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853. Octavo, contemporary three-quarter red morocco for presentation, marbled boards and endpapers, all edges gilt.
First edition in book form of Dickens’ ambitious, bracing masterpiece, with 40 engraved illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”), including frontispiece and nine other dramatic “dark plates,” as well as vignette title page. This copy a very rare presentation copy, specially bound in the original three-quarter red morocco presentation binding, boldly inscribed and signed by Dickens with his characteristic flourish on the dedication page to Frank Stone, Dickens’ close friend and neighbor, father of future Dickens illustrator Marcus Stone, “Frank Stone ARA from Charles Dickens, Third October 1853.”
Structured “with a daring double narrative and centered on institutional satire,” Bleak House is “technically [Dickens’] most ambitious novel and widely held to be his masterpiece” (Schlicke, 45). In it, “for the first time [society] is seen as an absurdity, an irrelevance, almost a madness. A dark force from which the real people must escape in order to create another society of their own… [Dickens] had been preparing for this novel all his life and, despite the calamities… which had helped to provoke it in the first place, … was even happy while he was writing it… It might even be said that Bleak House cured the very malaise which was responsible for its composition” (Ackroyd, 649-50). “The Dickens cosmos, his phantasmagoric London and visionary England, emerges in Bleak House with a clarity and pungency that surpasses the rest of his work, before and after” (Bloom, 311). Originally published in parts. With half title. Smith 10. Gimbel A131. Eckel, 79. Podeschi A131. Recipient Frank Stone (1800-59) was a painter, actor, and journalist who became close friends with Dickens in the late 1830s and even lived as the author’s neighbor for many years. Stone also served as an actor and costume/set adviser in several amateur theatrical performances produced by Dickens. The author dedicated Bleak House “As a remembrance of our friendly union, to my companions in the Guild of Literature and Art,” and by inscribing this copy to Stone on the dedication page, Dickens clearly included Stone as one of his companions in that guild. When Stone died unexpectedly at age 59, Dickens, acting as executor, made funeral arrangements, settled the estate, counseled the family, and made arrangements for the future education and professional careers of Stone’s two sons. One of these sons, Marcus, went on to illustrate editions of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. “The young [Marcus] Stone spent considerable time in the neighboring Dickens household and performed in their family theatricals… At the age of twelve Stone drew a sketch from Dickens’s Bleak House, which he presented to the author. Dickens inscribed his thanks on a copy of his book A Child’s History of England, writing ‘you have made an excellent sketch from a book of mine which I have received (and preserved) with great pleasure'” (ODNB). Later owner pencil signature.
A bit of light wear to extremities, tape reinforcement to front inner paper hinge, minimal toning to text, moderate toning to illustrations, primarily to margins, as always. Exceptionally rare and desirable presented and boldly signed by Dickens.
