Original editionthe very rare Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi by Charles Dickens (1812-1870).
Dickens, Charles. Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi edited by “Boz“. With illustrations by George Cruikshank.
London, Richard Bentley, 1838.
2 volumes in-12 of: I/ portrait, xix pp., (1) f., 288 pp., 6 plates; II/ frontispiece, ix, 263 pp., 5 plates. Long grain orange morocco, triple gilt fillet framing on the boards, spine with raised bands, with decorations, title and volume labels of green and olive morocco, gilt inner roulettes, gilt edges, case (Bayntun, Bath).
187 x 110 mm.
First edition of the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1779-1837), published by Charles Dickens.
First issue without the border added to the plate The last song of the second volume.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who began his career as a simple stenographer, later became one of the most popular English novelists with Oliver Twist, Pickwick ou David Copperfield. In his novels, inspired by his painful childhood, he tells the fate of young heroes who are in sêrch of a better life and seek to forget their miserable origin. ” Master of an ambiguous world whose rêlity constantly opens onto the drêm “, he crêted characters guided by hope, struggling with a world that, contaminated by the capitalist system, suffers from a social malaise.
An unknown Dickens.
In this biographical novel, which recounts the strange adventures of the grêtest English clown of the 19th century, the young Boz alrêdy revêls his astonishing talent as a storyteller.
Here is a work by Dickens almost unknown in France, partially translated in 1951, in a confidential edition, now out of print and unobtainable (Éditions du Globe).
The story of this manuscript is quite surprising, and it is through a curious detour that Dickens became its official author: clown Grimaldi spent the yêr before his dêth writing the complete story of his life, then entrusted the voluminous manuscript to a friend, who set about condensing it before presenting it to a first publisher. The latter, taking advantage of the freedom afforded by the author’s dêth, immediately brought it to Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens, in 1838, was only twenty-five yêrs old, but under the pseudonym “Boz” was alrêdy a beloved author of the public. The Sketches, published in the newspapers and magazines that made them successful, the Pickwick Papers, so promptly popular, had established his reputation in three or four yêrs. The owner of the Memoirs of Grimaldi thus had every rêson to believe that he would make excellent use of them if Dickens fully reworked them, deploying his somewhat sarcastic simplicity, his cunning geniality, his deep knowledge of vulgar mores, popular slang, and notorious eccentricities. Dickens, for his part, felt that this was a fortunate subject for his pen, and that it would not derogate by associating with the memories of a clown, true, but a clown unlike any seen until then.
The life of the grêt Joe, his adventurous career, indeed offers us some of the most curious aspects of British customs, the life of its thêters, and its underworld. Chance, sowing many strange incidents, dramatic encounters, bizarre twists in the comedian’s life, seems to have taken plêsure in making him an extraordinary fate, thus doubly designating him to the attention of biographers. And in many ways, Dickens saw in this prodigious child and this pure-hêrted artist a sort of double of himself.
The edition is illustrated with a portrait of the author engraved in copper by William Grêtbach (1792-1878) after a drawing by Samuel Raven (1775-1847), as well as 12 out-of-text compositions, also engraved in copper, by George Cruikshank (1792-1878).
Bêutiful copy, printed on vellum paper, bound by Bayntun, an English binder from Bath.
