BLEAK HOUSE by Dickens Charles - 1853

New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1853. 2 volumes. First Edition, American Issue. Illustrated as called for with a frontispiece engraving of Dickens and 37 additional plates after "Phiz" on various papers. 8vo, publisher's original royal blue cloth, the covers decorated and stamped in blind, the spines lettered and decorated in gilt, housed in a dark blue slipcase with black morocco label gilt. xvi, 480; 481-936, 4 ads pp. A very good and handsome set sometime recased, the paper as usual has evidence of foxing as was typical of the stock used by Harper & Brothers at this time. FIRST AMERICAN ISSUE OF THIS IMPORTANT WORK BY DICKENS. PUBLISHED AT THE SAME TIME AS THE ENGLISH ISSUE. ‘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..