Nov 17, 2020 - Sale 2551

Sale 2551 - Lot 164

Price Realized: $ 35,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 40,000
DICKENS, CHARLES. American Notes for General Circulation. 2 volumes. Half-titles; first state with second Contents page in volume 1 misnumbered xvi and 6pp. of advertisements at the end of volume 2. 8vo, original horizontally ribbed brown cloth stamped in blind bound by Leighton & Eeles with their ticket, spine titles gilt, rear hinges starting, front covers detached, vol. 1 with front flyleaf and following leaf with advert on verso also loose, joints chipped and a few small tears to spine; yellow-coated endpapers. London: Chapman and Hall, 1842

Additional Details

First edition, superb literary association, author's presentation copy from Dickens' first American tour, inscribed to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. the day after publication ("Richard Dana / From his friend / Charles Dickens / Nineteenth October, 1842") on the half-title in the first volume. Additionally signed by Dana on the front pastedowns. Shortly after Dickens arrived in Boston in late January 1842 a dinner was held in his honor on February 1st at Papanti's Dancing Academy on Tremont Row, and was to be the public climax of Dickens's reception in Boston. Prominent guests included Josiah Quincy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Allston, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. A survey of Rare Book Hub and ABPC yields four similar copies inscribed by Dickens on or about the present date sold at auction, including one other copy inscribed to an attendee at the present dinner (Josiah Quincy). Dana's claim to literary fame, Two Years Before the Mast, had been published to favorable reviews to an uncredited Dana in September 1840. Provenance: includes a holograph transmittal letter by Dana's grand daughter Elizabeth Ellery Dana: "I wish this book (in two volumes) to go to my nephew Richard H. Dana and to be left by him to his sons [...]", dated 1931. A very fine association. Eckel 108-09; Smith II:3; Yale/Gimbel A66.