First edition, first issue with 'STAVE I' on page [1]. Original red-brown cloth with gilt vignettes on upper cover and spine, and blind stamped border (Todd's first issue binding). Yellow coated endpapers and a blue and red title page dated 1843. All edges gilt. Four hand coloured plates by John Leech, with four woodcuts in the text. A very good copy indeed, with the cloth and gilt notably bright and entirely unrepaired, just a little wear to a couple of corners and a couple of tiny hairline splits to the rear joint. The spine is a little cocked and there is a bookplate to the front pastedown and neat ownership initials to the front endpaper. Internally very fresh and hinges perfect. A very well preserved copy.

Dickens completed writing A Christmas Carol in November 1843 and was determined to produce it as a beautiful gift book. He stipulated that it should have a fancy binding, all edges gilt and four full page hand coloured etchings. He asked for the title page to be printed in red and green and to have matching hand coloured green endpapers. Once the first copies had been produced thus Dickens found, to his disappointment, that the title page colours looked drab and the chalky endpapers smudged and colour dusted off. In response, the title page was now to be printed red and blue and use yellow coated endpapers, which did not need to be hand coloured and thus had more durability. Together with these changes was an amendment to the date on the title page from 1844 to 1843 as the book was to be published for Christmas of that year. So it was that copies with yellow endpapers and red and blue titles were the ones prepared for publication day. The order in which copies were bound up for sale is impossible to determine and is a matter for conjecture as all three main variants were available on publication day and the publishers would most likely have issued whatever was to hand.
The book was an instant success, reportedly selling all 6000 copies of the first edition on the first day of publication, almost single-handedly spawning a new genre of "Christmas literature". Buoyed by his success, Dickens wrote a further four Christmas stories each seeking to strike a blow for the poor, uneducated and repressed, but imbuing his message with characteristic humour and good cheer. All were well received and sold well, though it is A Christmas Carol which has best stood the test of time.
"it is rather as if Dickens had rewritten a religious tract and filled it both with his own memories and with all the concerns of the period. He had, in other words, created a modern fairy story. And so it has remained." - Peter Ackroyd (Dickens)

Smith II 4

Stock ID: 45757