Bleak House. by Dickens, Charles - 1853

London: Bradbury Evans, 1853. First edition of this Dickens' classic. Octavo, bound in three quarter morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised bands, engraved title page and 39 engraved plates by H.K. Browne including tissue-guarded frontispiece. With the publisher's blue illustrated wrappers and advertisements from the original serialized parts bound in at rear. In very good condition. A nice example. "In Bleak House 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).