Lot 166: DICKENS, Charles. "Hunted Down". In: The Lamplighter's Story; Hunted Down; The Detective Police; and other Nouvellettes...Complete in One Volume. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, [1861].

DICKENS, Charles. "Hunted Down". In: The Lamplighter's Story; Hunted Down; The Detective Police; and other Nouvellettes...Complete in One Volume. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, [1861].

8o (185 x 126 mm). Frontispiece, vignette-title, two plates and some wood-engravings in the text of Lamplighter and Hunted Down. (Lightly browned, gathering 12 sprung.) Original black cloth, covers decorated and lettered in blind, spine lettered and decorated in gilt (rebacked preserving the original spine); quarter black morocco gilt slipcase. Provenance: Kenyon Starling (bookplate).

FIRST EDITION IN BOOK FORM, uniform with "Peterson's Uniform Duodecimo Edition of the Complete Works of Charles Dickens 'Boz'", blindstamped as such on the front cover, entered at the Clerk's Office in 1861. Written especially for and preceded by serial publication in the New York Ledger, 20 August - 3 September 1859, and subsequently published in England in All the Year Round, 4 and 11 April 1860.

Dickens based this grisly tale of murder on the infamous London journalist Thomas Griffiths Wainewright who slowly poisoned his sister-in-law with strychnine after insuring her life for £18,000. Dickens visited Wainewright in Newdigate Prison before the criminal was transported to Australia. This volume also contains Dickens's The Ghost in Master B.'s Room, and the first editions in book form of Wilkie Collins's The Ghost in the Cupboard Room and Mrs. Gaskell's The Ghost in the Garden-Room.

Peterson and Brothers's was the first uniform collected edition of Dickens's works to be published in the U.S. between 1851 and 1865. They purchased the printing plates from Harper & Brothers, Lea & Blanchard, and others who had published separate editions of Dickens's works. The various resulting editions were published in different styles and at different prices from a cheap paper covered to royal octavo illustrated with plates. Edgar & Vail, p. 28; Wilkins, p. 44; Quayle, 44; Queen's Quorum 4; Yale/Gimbel D37.