SALA (George Augustus). Twice round the clock; Or the Hours of the day and night In London. By George Augustus Sala, Author of “A Journey Due North,” “Gaslight and Daylight,” etc. etc. Illustrated with A portrait of the author, and numerous engravings on wood, From drawings by William M‘Connel. London: Richard Marsh, 122, Fleet Street, 1862. Sm.sq.8vo; half-title not called for; portrait frontispiece and numerous full-page illustrations on text-paper, all included in the pagination; pp.xii (including frontispiece)+[5]-392; brown morocco-grain cloth, ruled and blocked blind on sides, ruled and lettered gilt on spine; end-papers coated pale yellow. Spine just a trifle darkened; two or three fox-spots passim on preliminary gathering; scattered neat light pencilled notes by an early reader, expanding incidental references in the text; otherwise a fine copy.

GB £130.00

US $213.20

First edition, second state of text. Originally printed serially in volume one of ‘The Welcome Guest’ in 1859 (a weekly magazine published by Houlston and Wright), and issued by them in volume form, with an undated title-page, in the same year. A further, and dated, edition was issued without the illustrations by W. Kent & Co. in f’cap 8vo format, in 1861. The present volume consists of sheets of the first edition (as is evidenced by paper stock and correspondences of occasional slight type damage: as for instance on p.176 where at l.23 the upright of the ‘L’ in ‘Lazarus’ exhibits a small break in the left-hand edge of the down-stroke, and in the last line the word ‘accompaniments’ has a few letters slightly battered), with the original prelims. suppressed and new ones, recording the change of publisher, substituted. The new prelims. are on a different paper stock of a very slightly inferior quality. The odd pagination of the prelims. in this volume reproduces that in the first issue, and appears to have been the result of Sala’s Preface, occupying pp.[v]-xii, having been added as something of an afterthought when the rest of the pagination had already been fixed. We have not come across Richard Marsh as the publisher of any other volume. The British Library records both the first issue of 1859 and the edition dated 1861, but not the present issue; Wolff, 6139 and 6139a, recording both the Houlston and Wright issue and the present one, but not the issue of 1861. Reckoned by Ralph Straus (‘Sala, the Portrait of an Eminent Victorian’, London, 1941, p.133) as “by far the best book that Sala ever wrote". The idea, as Sala says in his Preface, was suggested to him by a book called ‘Low Life’, published exactly one hundred years before, in 1759, which treated a similar twenty-four hour period of the London scene, a copy of which had been lent to him by Dickens (who had in turn received it as a gift from Thackeray).
Ref: IRT807340