6 original monthly parts, 8vo. Engraved portrait frontispiece, 12 wood-engraved plates by S.L. Fildes. (Some minor staining, slight toning.) Original blue-green pictorial printed wrappers, uncut and a few parts partially unopened (head margin of part 1 wrapper trimmed close affecting text, slight soiling and chipping, a few spines neatly repaired); pull-apart case. Provenance: Various signatures and annotations to a few parts.

FIRST EDITION, IN ORIGINAL MONTHLY PARTS, FIRST ISSUE with "Price Eighteenpence" pasted to the part 6 front wrapper. With the rare "Cork Hat" slip in part 2. NEARLY COMPLETE WITH TEXT, PLATES, WRAPPERS, SLIPS, AND ADVERTISEMENTS as called for in Hatton & Cleaver and in the first state, except that it lacks 2 advertisements at the end: part 5 lacks the 8pp. "31st July, 1870 Chapman & Hall's Recent Publications; " part 6 lacks the 4pp. Wilcox and Gibbs advertisement. Dickens only completed 6 parts of this work before his death, 3 of which were published while he was alive, leaving readers in suspense regarding the outcome of the tale. Eckel, pp. 96-98; Hatton and Cleaver, pp. 373-384.