[DICKENS, CHARLES]. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Chapman & Hall, MDCCCXLIV [1844].
Hardcover. First edition, first issue in book form. Leather-bound. Octavo (220 x 135mm), pp. [xiv], 624. Finely bound in dark-green full morocco, signed by Bayntun-Riviere, Bath, England. Spine with five raised bands, the compartments and bands fully gilt ruled, tooled and lettered. Boards and edges gilt ruled. Upper board with gilt impressed oval portrait vignette of the author. Rear board with gilt impressed authors facsimile signature. Elaborate inner gilt dentelles. All page edges gilt. Marbled pastedowns and endpapers. Engraved frontispiece and extra title-page, illustrated throughout by phiz. First state of text with "100£" on the engraved title-page.
Condition: FINE. A superb copy; internally near pristine, with crisp pages, without previous ownership markings; binding tight, the hinges perfectly preserved, gilt fresh and bright, covers unblemished. Scarce thus.
Note: First edition. Dickens's biographer places Martin Chuzzlewit as marking "a great change in Dickens's conception of moral characteristics. For the first time Dickens begins to explore the contradictions and difficulties of the contemporary human world; these are no longer figures defined by a single characteristic or animated by the wilful principle of a 'humour', but ones who are seen to change with the changing world, to live and grow" (Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 392). Dickens wrote to a contemporary that "I think Chuzzlewit is a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories" (cited in Berard, Dickens and Landscape Discourse, p. 3). Smith I, 7; Hatton and Cleaver pp. 183-212.
