Dickens, Charles | Bleak House, the author's copy

Dickens, Charles

Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853

8vo (209 x 124 mm). Frontispiece, engraved title, and 38 plates by H.K. Browne (“Phiz”); moderate foxing and browning to plates and adjacent leaves, mainly marginal, more heavily so to frontispiece and engraved title. Contemporary half black morocco over marbled boards, spine with raised bands; rubbed, extremities worn.

The author's copy — first edition in book form of Dickens’s “State of England” novel, from the library at Gad’s Hill Place.

Published in twenty monthly parts between March 1852 and September 1853, Bleak House is widely regarded as one of Dickens’s greatest creations. Drawing on personal experience and acute social observation, he constructed an ambitious, polyphonic narrative that merges the traditions of the social novel with elements of mystery and the gothic—anticipating the modern detective genre. At its heart lies the interminable legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a scathing satire on the chancery system and the broader institutional decay Dickens perceived in Victorian England.

Alongside Hard Times and Little Dorrit, Bleak House forms part of Dickens’s great mid-century “Condition-of-England” trilogy—works which Claire Tomalin has called highly innovative and poetic accounts of mid-nineteenth-century life, suffused with anger and dark humour, populated by lawyers, financiers, aristocrats, bricklayers, circus performers, soldiers, factory-owners, imprisoned debtors, child-labourers, dancers, aesthetes, thieves, detectives and "wives jealous, fierce, tender and battered.” The novel opens with what can be called the most magnificent opening to all the author’s novels, a fog that is both literal and symbolic, setting the tone for Dickens’s relentless attack on the moral murk of England’s institutions (Tomalin, pp. 240–41).

The present copy bears Dickens’s Gad’s Hill Place booklabel, dated June 1870—the final month of his life—and is recorded in the Dickens Library Online.

Gad’s Hill Place, in Kent, was Dickens’s cherished country home, purchased in 1856. From there, he completed A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. On 8 June 1870, he suffered a stroke at the house and died there the following day, leaving his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.

"Bleak House is not certainly Dickens's best book; but perhaps it is his best novel" (G.K. Chesterton).

REFERENCES:

Smith I:10; Eckel pp. 79-85

PROVENANCE:

Charles Dickens, Gadshill Place (printed label dated June 1870)