"Gold-embossed Cover with Four Comic Vignettes" — Volume VIII of the Household Edition for Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities" (1874)

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Gold-embossed Cover with Four Comic Vignettes

Fred Barnard

25.5 cm high by 19 cm wide (10 ⅛ by 7 ½ inches); pages each 25 cm by 17.5 cm (9 ¾ high by 6 ⅞ inches wide).

The four, gold-embossed figures on the green leatherette cover represent some of the late Charles Dickens's most celebrated comic characters: Mr. Pickwick, Seth Pecksniff (with the pointed tonsure), Whackford Squeers (holding the medicinal spoon), and Captain Cuttle, with the prosthetic hook: all appear on the cover of each volume of the Household Edition (1872-79).

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Detail of the Title-page Vignette of the Chapman and Hall Household Edition, Vol. VIII (1874)

Gold-embossed Cover with Four Vignettes, Cover for Volume VIII of The Household Edition, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens with twenty-five illustrations by F. Barnard. London: Chapman and Hall, 193 Piccadilly. (1874).

The new series began with Oliver Twist in 1871 (illustrator: James Mahoney) and concluded with John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens in 1879 (illustrator: Fred Barnard). The name of the first edition to be published after Dickens's death in 1870 — "The Household Edition" — was chosen in part, of course, because of the appeal of Household Words, which readers brought up in the 1850s would probably have enjoyed as "family" reading. But "Household" may also refer to the fact that this was literally an edition "for the home," and was meant as a kind of "library edition" for ordinary readers and the less affluent, who would be able, through careful budgeting, to purchase the entire run of twenty-two volumes over a protracted period, either volume by volume or a single instalment per month. Perhaps, then, we should consider Chapman and Hall's entitling this large-format, beautifully bound edition as "being for the Victorian hearth and home," the gold-stamped binding recalling some of Dickens's best loved characters and the colour of the initial serial wrappers for the novels from 1836 through 1870. What is especially ironic, then, about Volume VIII is not its embossed cover (which merely replicates the covers of the previous six volumes), but the hideous female Jacobin who holds aloft a blood-dripping dagger on the title-page of Volume VIII.

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. Vol. VIII.

Scenes and characters from the works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings, by Fred Barnard, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz); J. Mahoney; Charles Green; A. B. Frost; Gordon Thomson; J. McL. Ralston; H. French; E. G. Dalziel; F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes; printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman and Hall, 1908.

Created 3 November 2025