The Personal History of David Copperfield. by DICKENS, Charles - 1850

London: Bradbury & Evans,, 1850. Octavo (210 x 132 mm). Contemporary half purple calf, spine lettered, compartments in gilt, purple cloth sides with gilt rules, marbled edges and endpapers. Etched pictorial title page, frontispiece, and 38 etched plates by H. K. Browne. A very nice copy, expertly furbished (repair to joints, ends and tips consolidated, gilt improved) some oxidisation and foxing to plates, else clean. First edition in book form, following publication in parts from May 1849 to November 1850, from the library of the British astronomer and chemist Warren De la Rue (1815-1889), with his bookplate. In the preface to a later edition (1867), Dickens would call the novel his "favourite child". It is generally considered among his masterpieces, and it is his first first-person novel. The present copy has "screamed" corrected to "screwed" on page 132, the former seen in some early copies. Smith I 9; Hatton and Cleaver, p. 253.