The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. by DICKENS, Charles - 1839: With Illustrations by Phiz.

London: Chapman and Hall,, 1839. Extra-illustrated Octavo (205 x 128 mm). Finely bound in full green morocco by W. Root & Son c. 1900 in green full morocco, title to spine in gilt, compartments decorated in gilt, triple gilt rule to covers with floral device in each corner and dotted panel in gilt, edges and turn-ins gilt, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt. Engraved portrait frontispiece of Dickens by Finden after Daniel Maclise, 39 engraved plates by Phiz, 24 additional plates by Kenny Meadows and 40 Thomas Onwhyn, all with tissue guards. Bound without half-title. A notably clean copy, handsomely bound. First edition, bound from the monthly parts, complete with the Maclise portrait and 39 plates and copiously extra-illustrated with two sets of contemporary plates issued by other publishers to accompany the book as it appeared in parts. "Whether by the same or rival publishers, extra-illustrations became part of the marketing of his works... the early sets participated in the periodicity of Dickens's monthly publications in that they were also published in monthly parts to be completed with the completion of the text; they were advertised on the wrappers and in the Advertisers" (Calé, pp. 10-11). The plates included here by Thomas Onwhyn, under the pseudonym Peter Palette, were the first such addition to Nicholas Nickleby. They were issued between 30 June 1838 and 31 October 1839, entitled "Illustrations to Nicholas Nickleby, edited by Boz. By Peter Palette". "Palette's Illustrations are presented as complementary to Phiz's: 'Those who are subscribers of Boz's work will lose half the zest of Nickleby's story if they fail to take Peter Palette'" (Calé, pp. 14-15). Onwhyn first "came to public notice by his contribution of a series of 'illegitimate' illustrations to works by Charles Dickens. He executed twenty-one of the whole series of thirty-two plates to The Pickwick Papers, which were issued in eight (though intended to be in ten) monthly parts by E. Grattan, 51 Paternoster Row, London, in 1837; they are for the most part signed with the pseudonym Samuel Weller, but some bear Onwhyn's initials. From June 1838 to October 1839 Grattan issued a series of forty etchings by Onwhyn, illustrating Nicholas Nickleby. In a letter of 13 July 1838 Dickens referred to 'the singular Vileness of the Illustrations' (Letters of Charles Dickens, 1.414)" (ODNB). The suite of 24 wood-engraved plates by Kenny Meadows was originally issued in six parts by Robert Tyas in 1839-40 under the title "Heads From Nicholas Nickleby. From drawings by Miss La Creevy" (see Cambridge Companion, p. 31). The only sets of this recorded on Library Hub and WorldCat are at the British Library and the Huntington; during the 20s and 30s copies appeared at auction with some regularity but only two have come up in the last forty years (1978 and 2008). Eckel pp. 64-5; Smith 5; Heads: Yale/Gimbel H1112; John O. Jordan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, 2001. Luisa Calé, "Dickens Extra-Illustrated: Heads and Scenes in Monthly Parts (The Case of "Nicholas Nickleby")." The Yearbook of English Studies 40, no. 1/2, 2010.