Oliver Twist. First Edition, Illustrated by Cruikshank, 1838.

DICKENS, Charles (1812–1870). Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. London: Richard Bentley, 1838.

First Edition, Second Issue. Three volumes. Octavo (8vo). Contemporary half leather over marbled boards; spines decoratively tooled in gilt with leather labels lettered “Oliver Twist” and “Modern Novelist.” Cancel title pages identify the author as Charles Dickens rather than the earlier “Boz.” Volume III retains the early textual reading “pilaster” twice on page 164 and the later “Church” state of the final Rose Maylie and Oliver plate. Illustrated with 23 of the 24 etched plates by George Cruikshank, lacking the frontispiece to Volume I.

Published in book form before its serialization in Bentley’s Miscellany had concluded, Oliver Twist was Dickens’s second novel and a foundational work of his early career. Its treatment of institutional poverty, the workhouse system, and childhood vulnerability helped establish the social and moral concerns that would remain central to his mature fiction.

Contents generally clean and without inscriptions, with scattered foxing to the plates and preliminary leaves and occasional marginal wear. One plate leaf has small marginal chips not affecting the image. Frontispiece to Volume I absent. Bindings remain sound and firm. Marbled boards rubbed and worn, with surface loss in places; leather rubbed with wear at the extremities. A Good+ set of this important early Dickens novel.

[Attributes: First Edition; Hard Cover; Illustrated; Three Volume Set.]