A Child's History of England. - 1852

London: Bradbury & Evans,, 1852-54 [i.e. 1851-53]. Dickens's radical interpretation of English history, in exceptional condition First edition in book form, first issue, in particularly nice condition - a slip from the 20th-century bookseller Charles Sessler of Philadelphia calls it "one of the most brilliant sets in existence". The work differs from all Dickens's other works in style, subject and composition, and is without question a radical interpretation of English history: "intensely anti-aristocratic and anti-monarchical" (ODNB). Dickens "thought that the book was innovatory in its iconoclasm and its support of 'The People'... Passionate in its partisanship, unbalanced in what it chooses to include, the book is mostly a record of bloodshed. There is hardly a page without macabre detail of torture, burnings, beheadings, massacre, and human cruelty. G. K. Chesterton felt that A Child's History represented 'the cock-sure, healthy-minded, essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of history which characterised the Radicals of that particular Radical era'. This is certainly true of the book's jingoism, contempt for the past, and admiration of the present, but the savage emotion and the violence belong uniquely to Dickens" (Schlicke, p. 97). The work originally appeared anonymously in Household Words between January 1851 and December 1853, with the volumes published in book-form in the December of those years, post-dated to the following years. Later issues altered the terminal advertisements of Dickens's works to include A Child's History of England. Three volumes, large sextodecimo. Original reddish-brown cloth, spines lettered and decorated in gilt, blind stamped border and gilt pictorial decoration to front covers, marbled endpapers and edges. Housed in a custom green cloth chemise and slipcase. Engraved frontispieces by F. W. Topham. Recent bookplate of Peter Russell to chemise. Very light sunning to spines and rubbing to joints, else a fine set. Eckel, p. 128; Smith II, 10. Paul Schlicke, ed., The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens, 2011.