Covers for volumes 5 and 12 of Dickens's "Collected Works" by Ticknor-Fields, Boston, in 16 volumes (1867).
n anticipation of Dickens's long-awaited 1867-68 reading tour, which the war between the North and the South postponed for seven years, the Boston publisher James T. Fields commissioned from Sol Eytinge, Jr., ninety-six designs for wood-engravings. These were to grace the pages of the exhaustive, sixteen-volume Diamond Edition of Dickens's works, each volume being (as the advertisement suggested) "handy" — of compact dimensions with very fine but sharp type. This twelfth volume, emblazoned with the gold-embossed diamond containing Dickens in profile, like the others in the series, was published to coincide with the start of that momentous visit to American shores. It contains thirty "reprinted pieces," essays and short stories dating from 1850 through 1856 in Dickens's weekly magazine Household Words.
The sixteen volumes of the Diamond Edition are as follows:
- Vol. I The Pickwick Papers
- Vol. II The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
- Vol. III Dombey and Son
- Vol. IV Nicholas Nickleby
- Vol. V The Personal History of David Copperfield
- Vol. VI Bleak House
- Vol. VII Little Dorrit
- Vol. VIII Our Mutual Friend
- Vol. IX Barnaby Rudge
- Vol. IX Hard Times
- Vol. X Sketches by Boz
- Vol. X Christmas Books
- Vol. XI Oliver Twist
- Vol. XII The Old Curiosity Shop and Reprinted Pieces
- Vol. XIII A Tale of Two Cities
- Vol. XIII Great Expectations
- Vol. XIV The Uncommercial Traveller & Additional Christmas Stories
- Vol. XV Reprinted Pieces
- Vol. XVI Christmas Stories
Relevant American Title-Pages for this Novel
- Title-page for the "Diamond Edition" of The Old Curiosity Shop and Reprinted Pieces (1867)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 1, 1861)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 2, 1861)
- O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 3, 1861)
Scanned images, colour correction, sizing, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose, as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned them, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1988.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop in Master Humphrey's Clock. Illustrated by Phiz, George Cattermole, Samuel Williams, and Daniel Maclise. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841.
_______. The Old Curiosity Shop and Reprinted Pieces. 18 Illustrations by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. XII.
Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London 1899 edition.
Schlicke, Paul, ed. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999.
Winter, William. "Charles Dickens" and "Sol Eytinge." Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard, & Co., 1909. 181-202, 317-319.
Created 8 April 2015
Last modified 16 June 2020