Please go to the new Special Collections Website at The Keep
This page is no longer updated. Please visit our new pages at The Keep: .
These pages may contain out of date information. Links to these pages may no longer work in the future.
Book spines from the Foyle Collection
Introduction
This collection enables Dickens readers of
today to examine his stories in their original presentation: illustrated
monthly serialisations in commercial publications, with all the constraints
and demands that the business of popular printing entails. Far removed
from the ‘novelised’ editions we know today, classics including
The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) and David Copperfield (1849–50)
appear in (largely complete) 20-part serialisations interspersed with
pages of advertisements for patent medicines, furniture and wigs. The
collection includes some bound first editions and an edition of Dickens’s
magazine, Household Words (Volume I, 1850). This latter item relates
to the Morley Letters, another special collection at Sussex. The collection
came to the University Library in 1988, on loan from Eastbourne Borough
Council.