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“Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."

Image of Lot 1021 | An unrestored first issue of Great Expectations and a rare survival thus

One of his finest achievements, universally acclaimed and introducing the orphan Pip and Miss Havisham.

The second of his novels (after David Copperfield) to be written in the first person, with tone and content mirroring the turmoil of his own life, Dickens originally wrote a bleak ending for the novel, which most critics since have felt was much better and more consistent with the author's vision in the book. Dickens allowed himself to be persuaded by Edward Bulwer-Lytton to replace it with a happier one, however, which is the version which appears in both the best-selling parts-issue and the first book edition.

An unrestored first issue of Great Expectations and a rare survival thus.

"Great Expectations ... is altogether something different. It did not come from research or the theatre but out of a deep place in Dickens's imagination which he never chose to explain...It is set, like so many of his books, in the period of his own childhood and youth...Great Expectations is not a realistic account of how the world was but a visionary novel, close to ballad or folk tale... The story begins in terror..."

(Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens. A Life, p.310)

The publication of Great Expectations as a three volume set was unique within Dickens' works. As noted by Peter Ackroyd this was "designed to cater for the growing library trade" and "Mudie's, the great exponent of the circulating library, took most of the first edition". Smith comments that "the rarity of the first issue of Great Expectations has been attributed to the probable small binding-up of copies with the first title-page, coupled with the fact (according to C.P. Johnson, Hints to Collectors"¦) that "the first edition was almost entirely taken up by the libraries.' Patten, pp. 290-92, states that 1,000 copies of the first issue and 750 copies of the second were printed and that probably most of the first and more than half of the second (1400 copies in all) were purchased by Mudie's Select Library.

The above, along with the availability of four later issues and the production of pirated title pages, resulted in many rebound copies being made up and the the original issue in cloth, as here, even more desirable.

REFERENCES:
Eckel, p. 91-93; Sadleir 688; Smith II: 14; Great Expectations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, Appendix D)