The Cricket on the Hearth
A Fairy Tale of Home
by Charles Dickens

A facsimile reproduction made from the original manuscript in Dickens's hand, published as a limited edition of 250 copies hand-bound in full leather. Each book is personally signed by Monica Dickens.

"The Cricket is a most tremendous success..."
"It has beaten my two other Carols (A Christmas Carol and The Chimes) out of the field, and is going still, like Wildfire."

So wrote a somewhat surprised Charles Dickens after the publication of The Cricket on the Hearth as his Christmas book for 1845.

One reason for such overwhelming sales was the publication occasioned by a vicious attack in The Times, which, of course, feared in Dickens a liberal competitor. A more reasonable response to the tale, and one which most readers will share, came from William Makepeace, Thackeray; in his review in the Morning Chronicle he called it "a good Christmas book, illuminated with extra gas, crammed with extra bonbons, French plums and sweetnesses."

To twentieth-century readers, A Christmas Carol has long seemed to be not merely the best but the only Christmas book by Charles Dickens. In fact, the custom of a Christmas tribute, whether a book, story, or a special number of Household Words or All the Year Round, was one that Dickens faithfully maintained for over a quarter of a century, sometimes alone, sometimes in collaboration. And nearly every year the task of writing his Christmas contribution crept up on him before he was quite ready. Though 1845 was exceptional by virtue of the fact that Dickens had no major novel underway at the time, he was nonetheless pressed by the complex negotiations required to orchestrate the needed backing for a daily newspaper. At one point, the project had appeared to have collapsed and Dickens wrote to the Countess of Blessington; "I have whistled it off, and am as merry again as my own Cricket - which, bye the bye, has been a good deal slighted in all these distractions".

The original manuscript of The Cricket on the Hearth in Dickens's hand is held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

For the first time this important document is reproduced in facsimile enabling the reader to see the many deletions and alterations made by Dickens to the script. An Introduction has been added by Andrew Sanders, and Verlyn Klinkenborg has contributed a Note on the Manuscript. Nine of the engravings from the first printed edition are included in this volume.

This edition is limited to two hundred and fifty numbered copies signed by Monica Dickens, great granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Each book is hand-bound in full leather with decorative gold blocking on the front and back boards and spine. There are marbled end-papers, gilded page edges, head and tail bands and a silk ribbon marker. A matching hand-made slip-case with label is also provided, and the book contains a frontispiece and other illustrations in colour.

The edition is finely printed on Archive Cream Laid, a permanent/durable paper, made in Fife, Scotland for a minimum life of five hundred years.

Nine of the engravings from the first printed edition are included in this volume.

Edition: 250 numbered copies in full leather. Number of pages: 168, including 9 engravings, some in colour. Trimmed size: 270mm x 230mm.

ISBN: 0 904351 21 1 Price: £275/$465 plus shipping