Great Expectations. by DICKENS, Charles - 1861

London: Chapman and Hall,, 1861. 3 volumes, octavo (183 x 117 mm). Early 20th-century polished tan calf, spine richly gilt in compartments, red and green morocco labels, place and date on red label at foot, sides ruled in gilt with a French fillet with ornaments at corners, gilt inner dentelles, gold vein marbled endpapers, top edge gilt. Joints of vol. II starting, a few minor blemishes internally, an excellent copy. First edition, first impression, published on 6 July 1861, one of 1,000 copies thus. The first impression of Great Expectations is a famously rare book. Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Clarendon 1978) states that 1,000 copies of the first impression and 750 of the second were printed and that probably most of the first and more than half of the second (1,400 copies in all) were purchased by Mudie's Select Library where, as circulating library copies, they inevitably suffered a high rate of attrition. The first edition was divided into five impressions, with distinct title pages labelling them as five editions. The modern bibliographical authority is generally agreed to be the table given in Appendix D to the Clarendon edition, 1993, in which Margaret Cardwell agrees with the traditional conclusion that the same setting of type was used for all five impressions: "there is no warrant for treating the five impressions as distinct editions" (p. 491). However, she deduces that the impressions were sequential and that minor corrections and gradual deterioration of type can be shown across the five impressions. This copy has Cardwell's points for the first impression throughout.