DICKENS’ OWN COPY OF EDMONDS’ TWO-VOLUME LIFE AND TIMES OF GENERAL WASHINGTON, 1835, EXCEEDINGLY RARE ASSOCIATION COPY WITH EACH VOLUME CONTAINING BOTH OF DICKENS’ DISTINCTIVE BOOKPLATES

(WASHINGTON, George) (DICKENS, Charles) EDMONDS, Cyrus. The Life and Times of General Washington. London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1835. Two volumes. 12mo, contemporary three-quarter morocco rebacked with original spines laid down, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, raised bands, marbled boards, endpapers and edges. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. $8800.

First edition of British author Edmonds’ two-volume biography of Washington, published in London in 1835, Dickens’ personal copy, from his library at his beloved Gadshill Place, each volume containing his bookplate (displaying a lion above Dickens name) and a letterpress bookplate stating “From the library of Charles Dickens, Gadshill Place, June, 1870,” added after Dickens’ death to identify those books in Dickens’ possession at that time.

This exceptional association copy of Edmonds' Life and Times of General Washington is Dickens' own copy, with each volume containing the writer's two bookplates: one displaying a lion above Dickens' name and the other stating, "From the Library of Charles Dickens, Gadshill Place, June, 1870." When Dickens first journeyed to America in January 1842 with his wife, they were met there, in an intriguing coincidence, by his American secretary, George Washington Putnam. Having completed their travels that June, an echo of Washington again arose when they "embarked upon the George Washington in order to begin their voyage home" (Ackroyd, 368). In Dickens' novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, published one year later, he touched on "the totemic quality of the name of the first President" with a character named Julius Washington Merryweather Bib, who would endlessly "intone 'to himself' his full name, as if it were a comforting religious rubric… Dickens had set out for America full of hope, but returned with considerable misgivings about what he had seen. And yet, as his American place and character names suggest, he recognized both the worth and potential of the American dream" (Dickens Quarterly).

Dickens moved into his beloved home at Gadshill Place in the late 1850s where, in his library, "he was surrounded by his books, as well as by his famous counterfeit book-backs" (Ackroyd, 780). The latter "book-backs" were displayed to disguise a door, so that when it was closed, it "continued the effect imparted to the room by the rows of books with which the walls were covered. Humorous titles had been invented for these pseudo volumes by Dickens and his friends, such as the following:—Five Minutes to China, 3 vols. Forty Winks at the Pyramids, 2 vols." and so on (Kitton, Life of Charles Dickens, 300). Volume I contains a facsimile leaf of a January 29, 1781 letter from Washington to Major Robert Howe, and Volume II features a folding facsimile leaf of Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. With frontispiece portraits of Washington, half titles. Allibone I:543. Owner signatures of Edward Randolph dated 1913. With Dickens' engraved bookplates and typeset Gadshill sale labels in both volumes. "In March 1856 at a cost of £1700 Dickens purchased the pleasant but modest Georgian country house Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester, for use as a country home… [This] was the first and only home that Dickens ever owned, and it was one in which he took great delight for the rest of his life" (ODNB). Books purporting to be from Dickens' library at the time of his death ought to meet three requirements: 1) Dickens' engraved bookplate of a recumbent lion holding a star; 2) the smaller typeset "Gadshill Place" label, dated June 1870, stating "From the Library of Charles Dickens"—these were affixed to volumes from Dickens' library for the 1878 sale of part of the library coordinated by Dickens' son Charley and Sotheran's; 3) a corresponding listing in Stonehouse's 1935 reprinting of the Sotheran's inventory of the library for that sale, which is searchable online at Dickenslibraryonline.org. Because bookplates are reproducible, and because even Charley Dickens was susceptible to adding the "Gadshill Place" label to volumes published after his father's death, the third criterion must be seen as essential. This set meets all three criteria.

Interiors with light scattered foxing, slight marginal dampstaining to preliminaries, a few minor expert paper repairs.