[Rarebooks] fa: [DICKENS] THOMAS SIBSON - ILLUSTRATIONS OF MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK (w/ 2 Extra Plates/Fine Morocco Binding)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with several other illustrated works, auctions  
ending Sunday, Nov. 21. Details and images can be found at the URL  
below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://shop.ebay.com/arch_in_la/m.html

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Thomas Sibson: Illustrations of Master Humphrey's Clock, in Seventy  
Plates, Designed and Etched on Steel. The Old Curiosity Shop. Barnaby  
Rudge. London: Robert Tyas, 1842. Hardcover 4to (26 x 18 cm; 10.25 x  
7.25 in) bound in full crimson crushed morocco, gilt-tooled  
decorations to boards, spine and dentelles, top page-edges gilt; wood- 
engraved title-page vignette, 6 pp. of text + 72 steel-engraved plates  
with plate guards.

Originally published in parts with 72 plates, this copy is complete  
with the 2 extra plates not included in the volume edition. Wear/ 
bumping to the corners and crown, mild sunning to the spine, top of  
rear hinge cracked but rear board is perfectly secure; short closed  
tear to the fore-edge of the title-page and first text leaf; mild  
toning to the plates and the interleaved plate guards, the latter with  
some offsetting from the plates; otherwise clean, free of foxing,  
firmly and handsomely bound. A very appealing copy. Quite uncommon,  
particularly so with the extra plates.

Thomas Sibson (1817-1844) was a gifted artist who arrived in London on  
foot at the age of twenty-one and quickly made a name for himself as  
an illustrator, executing plates for the Waverley novels, Samuel  
Carter Hall's Book of Ballads and, most notably, "a series of plates  
of scenes in Charles Dickens's novels, the dramatic power of which  
were as remarkable as their artistic skill" (DNB). Something of a  
political radical, he formed a close friendship with the Chartist  
author and engraver William James Linton, with whom he planned an  
illustrated history of England “in which the social life of the  
English people should be dominant, and its epochs so distinguished,  
instead of by the reigns of Kings”. The project was never finished,  
due to Sibson's deteriorating health and early death. In his memoirs,  
Linton described Sibson as "a young man of great promise and some  
excellent performance, now utterly unknown... A tall, spare, not  
handsome youth he was, looking like a sinewy countryman, yet soon  
showing symptoms of a consumptive tendency; earnest, quick, and quaint  
and humorous, attractive and winning, and thorough in devotion to his  
art." Of the plates offered here, Linton wrote: "His first work of  
importance was a series of etchings, designs in illustration of  
Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge, by a long way the best  
illustrations of Dickens' works (I speak of them from present  
knowledge, corroborative of earlier perception), but the  
publication ... was not successful pecuniarily."