BLEAK HOUSE

London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853. First edition. Illustrated with 40 engraved plates by Hablot K. Browne. 8vo, in a handsome contemporary binding of three-quarter dark-green morocco over the original patterned cloth. The spine is fully decorated and elaborately gilt tooled with fine panel designs between gilt tooled raised bands separating the compartments, one compartment gilt lettered, the head and tail of the spine gilt tooled., marbled edges xvi, 624 pp. A fine copy, very well preserved, tight and strong, the plates all in nice condition with some of the usual edge mellowing. A very pleasing copy and an unusually good example. SCARCE FIRST EDITION OF THIS ESPECIALLY SOUGHT AFTER WORK. ‘With BLEAK HOUSE, Dickens thought he was making an advance in art. He had been occasionally reproached for the old-fashioned, happy-go-lucky progress of his stories, and now set himself resolutely to amend the fault. The result was a fiction which his biographer considers very nearly perfect....Nothing is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre, and to this larger interest all the rest is irresistibly drawn.’ (see Forster and Gissing)
There is ingenuity throughout and an almost total disregard for probability...it is a brilliant, admirable, and most righteous satire upon the monstrous iniquity of “old Father Antic the Law” with incidental mockery of allied abuses which, now as then, hold too large a place in the life of the English people.
A fine and handsome period piece in excellent state of preservation and presentation.