DICKENS, CHARLES. Great Expectations. London, 1861. First edition. 3 vols.
Great expectations. London: Chapman and Hall, 1861. First edition, fifth impression.Three volumes. Purple cloth boards (21 cm. tall), with blind-stamped arabesque. Elaborate gilt design to spines remains bright. Minor spots of discolouration to boards. Housed in custom drop-down clamshell case, designed by Chicago's Lakeside Press, with half-leather over purple cloth, with three simulated spines; slightly rubbed. Collation complete (as per Smith I, 14). Thirty-two pages of advertisements to rear of third volume, dated May, 1861. With circular bookplate of A. H. Sansom of Manchester to front pastedowns of each volume.Only 1000 copies of the first edition of this work were printed by Chapman and Hall, with most of those ending up in circulating libraries. Of further note, although Cardwell clearly states in Appendix D of her Clarendon edition that there are "no differences of textual interest" between the first five impressions of the first edition that she has identified, the current set matches the characteristics common to the fifth impression in all but one of the 126 cases of significnace that she has identified (namely page 213 of volume I, line 23, where the end-of-line hyphen does in fact appear).
