The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.: With Illustrations by Phiz.

London: Chapman and Hall,, 1839. In publisher's deluxe binding, bound from the parts First edition, in the publisher's deluxe binding of half morocco, bound from the original monthly parts with the stab-holes visible. Nicholas Nickleby followed the phenomenal success which Dickens reached with the Pickwick Papers. To secure Nickleby Chapman and Hall offered Dickens £150 a part, a sum ten times greater than that which he had received for Pickwick. As with its predecessor, the novel met with great public enthusiasm, which has continued unabated: Dickens's biographer Peter Ackroyd stated that the novel "has some title to being the funniest novel Dickens ever wrote; it is perhaps the funniest novel in the English language" (Ackroyd, Dickens, pp. 262). Upon the completion of the novel in monthly parts, the novel was issued by the publishers in book form, in three binding choices: in cloth, in half morocco with marble edges, and in full morocco with gilt edges. They also made available (and advertised as such with an inset included with the final instalment of the part issue) their binding services, for the same three bindings, for owners of the parts: cloth at 1s., 6d., half morocco at 4s. 6d., and full morocco at 6s. 6d. (Kremers, pp. 286-7). It is worth noting that for an owner of the parts to have their parts bound was much cheaper than to buy a copy of the new book-form issue - to purchase a book-form copy in half morocco would cost the purchaser £1, 4s., 6d., four times as much as to bind up their parts. Copies bound from the parts, as opposed to book-form copies, can be distinguished by the presence of stab-holes in the gutter (as here) from the unstitching of the parts from their wrappers. For the book form, clean sheets were printed without bearing these holes. The binding services continued to be offered long after publication, both as the publisher bound up remaining first edition sheets for new issues (apparently as late as 1857 for Nickleby), and for private individuals to continue to make use of the binding services. The publishers offered the same binding services for future Dickens novels, and so the individual who had the parts issues of earlier Dickens novels could commission bindings for multiple novels simultaneously. Minor variation in tooling, cloth, and morocco occurred over time for these bindings, which can indicate earlier and later bindings, though the full sequence and firm dates have never been established. The presence of morocco-grain cloth on this copy indicates that it was bound around the 1850s, when Chapman and Hall begun to use morocco-grain cloth - they had until then predominantly used fine-diaper cloth. Octavo (209 x 134 mm). Original purple half morocco, spine lettered in gilt, spine bands with gilt floral roll and bordered with blind rules, green morocco-grain cloth sides, marbled endpapers and edges. Engraved portrait frontispiece, 39 engraved plates by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz). Complete with half-title. Spine sunned and a little rubbed, minor wear at tips, binding firm and intact, some light soiling to contents and minor browning to plates as usual, short closed tear at fore edge of plate facing p. 238. A very good copy. Lars Kremers, "A Comparative Bibliography of the Sheets and Publishers' Cloth Cases of the Demy Octavo Works of Charles Dickens, 1837-1872", PhD thesis, Curtin University, November 2013.