The Collected Dickens: A Bibliography of the Lifetime U.K. Editions of Charles Dickens's Works by Jeremy Parrott (review)

Jeremy Parrott, independent scholar and the author of this essential new bibliography, is best known as the discoverer and owner of the markedup set of All the Year Round, which identifies hundreds of contributors to Dickens's periodical. Scholars around the world eagerly await publication of his research pertaining to that remarkable discovery. But in the meantime, they will be delighted with this informative, interesting, nicely illustrated and fully researched bibliographic work.

The volume is an important one, offering both basic and esoteric information about a topic rarely discussed and often misunderstood: collected editions of Dickens's works published in the UK in his lifetime. All Dickens scholars, Victorianists, Dickens collectors, and book dealers will be grateful for the work, and many generalists and Dickens enthusiasts will appreciate Parrott's insights into Dickens's publishing career.

In his succinct introduction, Parrott outlines the five relevant collected editions: the Cheap edition (1847–68, 18 volumes), the Library edition (1858–59, 22 volumes), the Illustrated Library edition (1861–74, 30 volumes), the People's edition (1865–67, 25 volumes), and the Charles Dickens edition (1867–75, 21 volumes). He identifies the scope and relevance of his bibliography, and summarizes some of the limitations of and errors in previously-published work on this topic, noting the scarcity of most of these volumes, identifying "ghosts" (books described in bibliographies that do not actually exist), and also a few recently discovered books, like the extraordinarily rare 1866 printing of the Illustrated Library edition of Our Mutual Friend – now identified as the second edition of Dickens's last complete novel. Parrott reveals Dickens's income from each of the books in these editions over time, presenting that information in a useful graph. Finally, Parrott clearly lays out the format and conventions for the descriptive bibliography of each of the 116 volumes to follow.

In this review, I will consider Parrott's discussion of the five collected editions, move on to an examination of his bibliographic descriptions, and conclude with some comments about the illustrations.

In his introduction to the Cheap edition, Parrott reproduces a little-known address from the sixth monthly instalment of Dombey and Son advertising the edition, gives the history of earlier cheap editions of other authors, and notes that earlier bibliographers identified as few as 15 and as many as 22 volumes in the series. Prices varied between 2s/6d and five shillings per volume; even the longer novels appeared in a single volume. Parrott provides notes about extra illustrations and binding variants in the volumes, transcribes the new prefaces in full, and gives the dates of subsequent reprints and the size of print runs.

Parrott explains why Dickens provided no new preface for the Cheap edition of David Copperfield – though new prefaces were an important feature in the edition. He also offers a plausible explanation for the publication of Great Expectations some three months before A Tale of Two Cities in this series. Though the Cheap edition was aimed for the domestic UK market, Parrott tells us it was later issued in 1866 by Lippincott in Philadelphia. Parrott notes that The Uncommercial Traveller appeared in book form for the first time in this edition, and that Our Mutual Friend, the final volume in the Cheap edition, is extremely rare, with at most 2,000 copies printed (less than half the number for other titles); perhaps only about 1,000 of those copies sold. He says the only copy he has found in any public collection is in the Charles Dickens Museum Library – the same copy I mentioned in my Everyman Dickens edition of the novel (London: Dent, 2000).

In his consideration of the Library edition, Parrott identifies the motivation for the edition: "a more substantial and permanent repository of Dickens's collected works than the Cheap edition." He highlights its poor...