£695.00
Dickens (Charles) and Wilkie Collins. No Thoroughfare. Being the Extra Christmas Number of All the Year Round. London: 26 Wellington Street, Strand; Chapman & Hall, 193 Piccadilly, 1867.
First edition, published as the Extra Christmas Number of Dickens’s celebrated weekly journal All the Year Round for Christmas 1867, written collaboratively by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.
Preserved in the original blue printed wrappers, priced fourpence, with the title, authors and complete contents printed to the upper wrapper. Scattered light spotting internally; original wrappers with some light staining and spotting. Bound within later blue wrappers, the upper cover bearing an early manuscript inscription recording the title, authorship and date, together with an ownership signature dated 1867. Margins lightly toned.
An attractive survival of one of Dickens’s final Christmas publications in its fragile original period wrappers.
Authors: Charles Dickens (1812–1870) & Wilkie Collins (1824–1889)
Title: No Thoroughfare
Year: 1867
Edition: First Edition
Publication: Extra Christmas Number of All the Year Round
Publisher: Chapman & Hall / All the Year Round, London
Format: 8vo
Original Price: Fourpence
Binding: Original blue printed wrappers, preserved within later blue wrappers
Original blue printed wrappers preserved, with light staining, spotting and age-related wear. Scattered light spotting internally and some marginal toning.
Bound within later blue wrappers bearing manuscript title, authorship and an ownership inscription dated 1867 to the upper cover. Overall a very good and appealing survival of an inherently fragile Victorian periodical publication.
By Christmas 1867, Charles Dickens was approaching the end of an extraordinary literary career.
For more than two decades, Christmas had become almost synonymous with Dickens. Beginning with A Christmas Carol in 1843, his seasonal writings helped establish the Victorian Christmas story as a literary phenomenon.
No Thoroughfare belongs to the final chapter of that tradition.
Written with Dickens’s close friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, the story first appeared as the Extra Christmas Number of All the Year Round in December 1867.
The collaboration brought together two of Victorian Britain’s greatest storytellers. Dickens supplied his characteristic drama, atmosphere and memorable characters, while Collins brought elements of mystery, suspense and intricately constructed plotting.
The story begins in London at the Foundling Hospital, where the identity of a child becomes the starting point for a complicated narrative involving mistaken identity, inheritance, romance, deception and danger. The action ultimately moves far beyond London into the dramatic landscapes of the Swiss Alps.
Its structure is deliberately theatrical: The Overture, followed by four Acts and finally The Curtain Falls.
That was no accident.
Dickens and Collins simultaneously developed No Thoroughfare for the stage, and a dramatic version opened at London’s Adelphi Theatre on 26 December 1867. The work therefore occupies an unusual position between Victorian periodical literature and popular theatre.
This copy preserves the form in which contemporary readers first encountered the story: not as a later collected book, but as the inexpensive fourpenny Christmas issue of Dickens’s own periodical.
This is a particularly evocative Dickens item because it retains the original blue printed wrappers of the 1867 Christmas issue.
Ephemeral periodical publications were designed to be read and discarded. Copies were frequently rebound, separated from their wrappers or simply worn out through use. Survival with the original printed covers therefore gives the piece substantially more character and collecting interest than a later collected appearance of the text.
It is also a genuine Dickens–Collins collaboration, bringing together two foundational figures of Victorian fiction at the height of their reputations.
Its date adds another layer of significance. Published at Christmas 1867, No Thoroughfare appeared less than three years before Dickens’s death in June 1870 and represents the final Christmas number produced through his periodical.
The contemporary-style manuscript outer wrapper is also appealing. The inscription records No Thoroughfare, Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins, and 1867, while the ownership inscription at the upper corner is likewise dated 1867—evidence of the publication being preserved from the year of issue.
For a Dickens collection, it is an attractive example of the author not simply as novelist, but as editor, periodical publisher, collaborator and architect of the Victorian Christmas story.
