The page edges are gilded and the volume contains eight illustrations: four hand-colored steel engravings and four black and white woodcuts. The title page is printed in red and blue with a branch of holly and a decorative frame with the date (1843) in Roman numerals at the very bottom of the page. This book’s cover is blind-stamped with a border of holly and ivy and both the spine and the front cover bear the title and author’s name in gold, surrounded by gold wreaths of holly. Readers often had their books rebound, especially those that were purchased with the publisher’s cloth bindings which tended to crumble with frequent use and, at least in Dickens’s case, were fairly plain. Bindings from the nineteenth century are notoriously fragile as increased mechanization and cheap materials such as fabric and paper began replacing more expensive bindings such as leather. The book, surprisingly for a nineteenth-century volume, is still cased in the original vertically-ribbed brown publisher’s cloth. This particular copy of A Christmas Carol does not give any clues as to its previous ownership: it is free of marks, labels, marginalia, stamps or any other identifiers that might provide a glimpse into its past homes and owners. The much disputed green endpapers note how the color has worn off due to an ineffective hand-coloring method.

Several books, articles, and bibliographers later, the small book sitting in a cradle in front of me had gained not only the still-disputed distinction of being a first edition, but had introduced me to the intricacies of bibliography and the detail attendant upon it. Intrigued by the idea of controversy over what I had always assumed was a simple matter of publication and chronology, I headed down the rabbit hole of bibliographical inquiry. Smith, stating that “various theories concerning states and issues of this, the first edition” exist.

The catalog record in Holmes claims that this book is a first edition, but also directs patrons to another work, Charles Dickens in the Original Cloth: A Bibliographical Catalogue of His Writings in Book Form in England with Facsimiles of the Bindings and Title Pages by Walter E. One of the first items to come up in the catalog was a copy of A Christmas Carol from 1843, the year Dickens’s first Christmas story was published.

While deciding on a topic for this blog post, I searched the Burns library’s holdings of the works of Charles Dickens, an author who is a frequent subject of my research. Īs a student assistant in the Burns Library Reading Room and a graduate student in the English department at Boston College, I occasionally have the privilege of combining my scholarly interest in Victorian literature with my practical responsibilities at the Burns Library. The cover of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, PR4572.

A christmas carol first edition