READE (Charles). Peg Woffington. A novel. Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1853. Lge.12mo; half-title not called for; pp.[ii]+[332 (final page blank)]; ripple grain cobalt blue cloth, sides blocked in blind with decorated border and centre piece; spine blocked and lettered in gilt; uncut edges; end-papers coated reddish brown. Back cover damp marked along lower edge of board; covers generally darkened, and showing some wear at corners and at head and tail of spine; end-papers renewed at an early date with white paper; light dusting throughout text and one or two small marks; a good copy, nonetheless, of one of the scarcest of this author's books.

Reade's first book, of which only five hundred copies were printed. Parrish, p.171; Sadleir 2011 and 2011a, recording copies only in pinkish maroon ripple grain cloth, differently blocked, and with two other (and different) colours of end-paper; Wolff, 5711, records only the first American edition. Number four on Sadleir's list of comparative scarcities, in any original binding. The present copy corresponds to Carter's ‘C' binding (v. Binding variants, p.148), of which he comments: "A and B are the perfectly normal variants for a novel at this period, though the description in the publishers' records CLOTH shows that the half cloth copies were probably wholesaler's binding. But C is a very queer affair, and I have only seen one example of it. It does not look secondary, since it is more gilt as to spine than B [he presumably meant A, of which it is also true, and would make more sense]; and it must presumably be a trial, since the other conceivable alternative - a library binding - is out of the question for a first novel of which only 500 were printed." Carter's hypothesis is given much support from the present copy in two different ways. In the first place the backing of the spine is good unused white card, not the waste that was normally used on a commercial run, and there is written on it in a contemporary hand, just visible on a careful inspection in good light, the legend "200/Peg Woffington". Two hundred is obviously a job number (the known rarity of this binding style precluding any possibility that nearly half the issue was so bound), and the fact that it should be written there at all is suggestive of an order for two or three copies only rather than for a commercial binding run. Second, the present copy bears on p.79 a litteral correction in the hand of one evidently used to correcting proofs, and it seems possible that it is to be considered both as a trial binding and as a proof copy. Sadleir calls for a conjugate dedication leaf to follow the title page. It is not present here, but since the end-papers have been renewed, it is not now possible to tell whether or not it has been lost. The title however is trimmed to a smaller measure than the rest of the book and may have been printed as a single leaf. The dedication leaf, which bears the date ‘December 15, 1852' was almost certainly the last portion of the book to be set in type, and might very well not have been ready by the time any trial copies were bound up. The (rebound) British Library deposit copy bears the accession date stamp ‘10 JA 53'.

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