Dickens, Charles

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. London: Chapman and Hall, April 1836 - November 1837

20 parts in 19, 8vo (224 x 140 mm). 42 engraved plates including frontispiece, by R. Seymour, R.W. Buss, and Hablot K. Browne ["Phiz"]; some toning and foxing, offsetting of plates, some closed margi🐼nal tears. Original light blue-green wrappers; Part I with more significant repairs, other minor soiling, chipping, and staining. Housed in custom clamshell case. (Complete collation available upon request.)

First edition of Dickens' first novel, in monthly parts.

“It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.”

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was initially conceived of as a series of comic sketches, written expressly to accompany monthly sporting plates by Robert Seymour. Dickens had the idea for Mr. Pickwick—a wealthy, retired businessman, with a penchant for good food and drink, an innocent and pla𒈔yful character, well-described later by W.H. Auden as "a pagan god wand♊ering through the world imperviously". For the first month the work met with little success, but then, following the suicide of the illustrator Seymour, Dickens took over the project, altered the concept and introduced the character of Sam Weller, Pickwick's cockney servant, in Part 4, to immediate public approval. Searching for a replacement illustrator, Dickens commissioned the young "Phiz" who worked on the remainder of the work and became his most sympathetic and consistent of illustrators. From this moment on sales of the monthly numbers rose steadily and then spectacularly, the names and characters in Dickens' novel becoming common currency, and the enormous public success of the novel accompanied by great critical acclaim.

Only about 400 sets of Part 1 were issued on the day of publication from a print-run of 1,000, with only 500 sets of Part 2 being subsequently printed. Both eventually sold out, necessitating reprints of both parts before publication of Part 3. Hence a perfect Part 2 becomes the keystone. The text to Parts 1 - 8 was reprinted many times at very early dates leading to textual variations; with reprinting, older plates had to be re-etched; with the increase in popularity advertisements changed, we🃏re cancelled and added - all leading to a complex series of issue points for text, plates and advertisements.

REFERENCE

Eckel (1929); Hatton and Cleaver 3-88