Author: DICKENS, Charles
Title: Little Dorrit
Description: London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857. Credit is a System Whereby a Person who can't Pay, gets Another Person who can't Pay, to Guarantee that he can Pay" (Charles Dickens) A Superb Complete Set in the Original Parts with all the Advertisements DICKENS, Charles. Little Dorrit. With Illustrations by H.K. Browne. London: 1857 [i.e. December 1855-June 1857]. First edition, in the original monthly parts: Twenty numbers bound in nineteen; first issue, following all points in Hatton & Cleaver. First state text in part XV with "Rigaud" for "Blandois." Octavo (8 7/8 x 5 11/16 inches: 225 x 145 mm.). [ i-v]vi-vii[viii-ix]x-xii[xiii] xiv, [1]2-625[626]. Forty inserted plates by "Phiz." Collates complete with all wrappers correct, all "Advertisers," all back advertisements, and all slips. Publisher's blue printed wrappers. Light soiling to a few covers, expert and almost invisible restoration to tips of a few backstrips, a few plates with light foxing or toning. Front wrappers of parts 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, & 17 with neat early ink signature "Miss Bradley". Housed in a green cloth clamshell case, spine lettered in black. One of the best copies that we have seen. "Originally issued in twenty numbers, bound in nineteen monthly parts [December 1855 - June 1857], price one shilling per number, except the last two (19 and 20) which formed a double-number, priced at two shillings. Blue paper wrappers were again employed; the design for the front wrapper being executed by Hablot K. Browne, who also etched the forty plates. Circulation figures were abnormal, equal almost to the record-breaking numbers of 'Bleak House'" (Hatton & Cleaver). Charles Dickens' eleventh novel Little Dorrit satirizes some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors' prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison in this case is the Marshalsea, where Dickens's own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional "Circumlocution Office". Dickens also satirizes the stratification of society that results from the British class system. Hatton & Cleaver, pp. 305-333. .

Keywords: Illustrated Books Books in Parts Nineteenth-Century Literature


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