As expected, the copy of Great Expectations shown here proved the star turn when Sotheby’s (25/20/13.9%) offered the splendid Charles Dickens collection formed by London accountant Lawrence Drizen.
Sold for £140,000 on September 24, it is a first-issue copy and one described in Prof John Mullan Allen’s catalogue introduction as “miraculously well preserved”.
The reason that so few really fine copies of this novel have survived is that Mudie’s Circulating Library, whose subscribers often borrowed only one volume at a time, bought up almost all of Chapman & Hall’s 1000 first-issue copies of 1861 – thus “…dooming them to multiple borrowing and hastened destruction”.