The Works of Charles Dickens (Household Edition). 22 vols in 12 (set)

London: Chapman and Hall, 1879. ~Late 19th-century rebinding in full dark burgundy cloth, gilt lettering to spines. Spines uniformly faded to attractive red colour. Corners sharp. A little black marking to spine of Our Mutual Friend &c. only. All edges marbled. Replacement endpapers either blank or marbled (in red & pale blue) with some mild age-toning. All hinges sound and endpapers uncracked at gutters. Binder's stamp of 'Geo. Winstanley, Manchester', to all vols: perhaps the George Winstanley (1824-1897) of the Winstanley family of bookbinders, active in Manchester until at least 1881. Minor damp-rippling to 2 final leaves of Hard Times. Small loss at gutter to final leaf of The Uncommercial Traveller. Text printed in double columns. Profusely illustrated throughout. Minor scattered foxing. Undated. Chapman & Hall's large format 'Household Edition' of Dickens' works was first published in weekly numbers, monthly parts, and volumes between 1871 and 1879. Given the stab-stitching evident to some gutters, these vols perhaps collect together numbers or parts. The first edition of Dickens' works to be published after the author's death in 1870, the Household Edition was intended as an affordable popular edition, drawing on Chapman and Hall's long association with Dickens, dating back to 1836, and appealing through its title and double-column text layout to readers' nostalgia for Dickens' 1850-59 journal Household Words. It was also, however, the first edition to include Forster's Life of Dickens, and was published with new illustrations by artists including Frederick Barnard, Char James Mahoney, and F. A. Fraser, bringing Dickens' now-classic works into a contemporary visual milieu: 'a clever attempt to align Dickens with the periodical and visual culture of the 1870s' (Louttit 328). Arthur Waugh in his 1930 history of Chapman and Hall calls the Household Edition 'certainly one of the most ambitious ventures' untaken by the firm, 'a new complete edition of Dickens reset in large type on a quarto page, and furnished with entirely new reproductions by a fresh set of artists' (175); in fact, the new illustrations were used along with some of the previously published classic illustrations by Phiz and others. Waugh particularly praises the illustrations by F. Barnard, who had been a friend of Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), and who 'took the "Phiz" types and humanized them; they lost nothing of "Phiz's" creative interpretation' but were 'stripped of (...) eccentricity' (ibid). One ardent admirer of the illustrations for the Household Edition, who mentioned Barnard by name, was Vincent Van Gogh, who in his letters 'frequently makes reference to the "excellent" and "very beautiful" productions of the illustrators of the Household Edition' (Louttit 242-43). This set collects the 22 vols of the edition into 12 unnumbered vols, with contents as follows: Oliver Twist & Martin Chuzzlewit / David Copperfield & Great Expectations / Bleak House & A Tale of Two Cities / Little Dorrit & The Old Curiosity Shop / The Pickwick Papers & Sketches by Boz / Our Mutual Friend & Barnaby Rudge / Nicholas Nickleby & Hard Times / Dombey & Son & The Uncommercial Traveller / Christmas Stories, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Reprinted Pieces, & Other Stories / A Child's History of England, American Notes, & Pictures from Italy / Christmas Books / Forster's Life of Dickens. An important edition in sound rebinding. C. Louttit, 2014, '"A Favour on the Million": The Household Edition, the Cheap Reprint, and the Posthumous Illustration and Reception of Charles Dickens', Book History, 17, pp. 321-64. A. Waugh, 1930, A Hundred Years of Publishing: Being the Story of Chapman & Hall, Ltd, Chapman and Hall. ~Robust packaging. Overseas orders trackable on request. . 1st edn thus. Hardback. Very Good+. c. 500pp. per vol. Binding sound, text unmarked.