Secondhand Charles Dickens Collected Works Bargain Book Box SP4283

Secondhand Charles Dickens Collected Works Bargain Book Box SP4283

A matched fifteen-volume set of Charles Dickens from the Waverley Book Company, London, in black bindings with gilt-decorated spines. Between them the volumes hold all fifteen novels, plus the Christmas books, the Christmas stories, Sketches by Boz and The Uncommercial Traveller. The set is illustrated, with the original plates by H.K. Browne (“Phiz”) credited on the title page, and it looks handsome lined up on a shelf.

1. Little Dorrit — Amy Dorrit was born in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, where her father has been held so long he is proud of it. Dickens’s own father was locked up there, and the anger shows.
2. A Tale of Two Cities / Great Expectations — Two novels in one volume. Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in another man’s place, and Pip learns that his fortune came from a convict and not from Miss Havisham.
3. Barnaby Rudge / Hard Times — A simple-minded boy and his raven are swept into the anti-Catholic riots of 1780. In the second novel, Mr Gradgrind raises his children on facts alone and watches it ruin them.
4. Christmas Books Etc. — A Christmas Carol and the four Christmas books that followed it, including The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. Scrooge, Marley’s ghost and Tiny Tim are all here.
5. Pickwick Papers — Mr Pickwick and his club tour England by coach, and get into duels, elopements and a breach-of-promise trial. Sam Weller arrives in chapter ten, and the book has been loved ever since.
6. Bleak House — The lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has run for generations and eaten every fortune it touched. It also has Inspector Bucket, one of the first detectives in English fiction, and many readers think it Dickens’s best.
7. Dombey and Son — Mr Dombey wants a son to carry on the firm and has no use for his daughter Florence. When little Paul dies, Florence is all he has left, and he still can’t see her.
8. David Copperfield — David is sent to work in a warehouse at ten, runs away to his aunt and grows up to be a writer. Dickens called it his favourite child, and it is the closest he came to telling his own life.
9. Martin Chuzzlewit — A family circles a rich old man, each hoping to inherit. The novel gave English the hypocrite Mr Pecksniff and the gin-loving nurse Mrs Gamp, and young Martin’s trip to America is savage.
10. Old Curiosity Shop Etc. — Little Nell and her grandfather flee London on foot, pursued by the dwarf Quilp, who is among Dickens’s most frightening villains. Crowds are said to have waited on the New York docks to learn whether Nell lived.
11. Christmas Stories / Edwin Drood — The seasonal tales Dickens wrote for his magazines, with his last novel. Edwin Drood vanishes on Christmas Eve, and Dickens died before revealing what happened to him.
12. Nicholas Nickleby — Nicholas takes a job at Dotheboys Hall, a Yorkshire school where unwanted boys are starved and beaten. He thrashes the headmaster and walks out with the school’s most pitiful pupil.
13. Our Mutual Friend — A body is pulled from the Thames, and a fortune made from London’s rubbish heaps passes to a kindly dustman. Dickens’s last completed novel, dark and funny in equal parts.
14. Uncommercial Traveller Etc. — Dickens walks the streets at night and reports what he finds: workhouses, docks, emigrant ships and city churchyards. His journalism, and some of his best writing.
15. Sketches by Boz / Oliver Twist — The young reporter’s first sketches of London life, with the novel that followed. Oliver asks for more, and Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy do the rest.