Pride and Prejudice. by AUSTEN, Jane - 1833

London: Richard Bentley,, 1833. Octavo (165 x 101 mm). Contemporary light brown calf, titles in gilt to dark red and dark brown calf spine labels, spine tooled in gilt and blind, gilt ruling to boards, blind tooling to turn-ins, marbeld edges and endpapers. Engraved vignette title and frontispiece by William Greatbach after Ferninand Pickering (tissue-guards intact). Booklabel of "Downs" to front pastedown. Sometime expertly restored, small chip to spine head, a little wear to extremities, front joint starting at top, hinges tender, internally clean and notably unfoxed. A very good copy. First Bentley edition, the fourth edition overall, and the first English edition to be illustrated. In 1832-3 Richard Bentley bought the copyright to all Austen's novels, which had not been reissued since 1818, to include them in his Standard Novels series, of which this is no. XXX. The Bentley illustrations, by the obscure Ferdinand Pickering, played an integral part in the reception of Austen's novels; according to one Austen scholar, they "promoted a sense that her novels were best understood as familial, female focused, and sensational. For decades, these illustrations would have served to steer readers away from the conclusion that Austen's fiction ought to be understood as social, comic, or didactic" (Looser). Gilson D5; Davoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen, 2017, p. 20.