DICKENS, Charles; HAYWOOD, Helen R., artist

Little Dorrit

London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857. Item #05162

With a Fine Original Watercolor on Calf Doublure
By Helen R. Haywood
Granddaughter of Master Binder Robert Riviere

[DICKENS, Charles]. HAYWOOD, Helen R., artist. Little Dorrit. With Illustrations by H.K. Browne. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1857.

First edition, first issue with all twenty-one internal text flaws as noted by Smith.

Octavo. (8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in; 216 x 138 mm). xii, 625, [1, blank] pp. Forty engraved plates by "Phiz" (H.K. Brown), including frontispiece and engraved vignette title page. With an inserted preliminary leaf printed "With Water Colour Drawing on Calf Doublure by" [signed] Helen R. Haywood.

Bound ca. 1930 by Rivière and Son (stamp signed to upper doublure) in full wine crushed morocco. Gilt French fillets. Gilt vignette to upper board. Five gilt ruled raised bands. Gilt lettered and decorated compartments. Original watercolor painting by Helen R. Haywood on calf to upper doublure (signed "HRH" at lower left corner) with gilt rolled decorative borders. Red moire silk endpapers. Red moire silk to lower doublure with gilt rolled borders. All edges gilt. Neat ink inscription on front blank "Louise Dalton Kirk./from/Mother and Dad-/1936-". A unique and fine copy. Housed in the binder's original fleece-lined red cloth slipcase.

The exquisite ca. 1930 original watercolor on calf and signed by Helen R. Haywood elegantly reproduces in color the Phiz plate "Flora's Tour of inspection" found opposite to page 519.

Helen R. Haywood (1908-1995), English painter and children's book illustrator Helen R[iviere]. Haywood was the granddaughter Robert Riviere, founder of the great bindery which executed this lovely binding. Her mother, Mabel, was Riviere's ninth and last child. She was born in England in 1908 but was taken as a child to Chile, where her father, an engineer, worked on the trans-Andean railway. She remained in Chile until she was approximately 15 years old. Her experiences were recounted in an unpublished novel,"Childhood in Chile." Miss Haywood was a keen student of science and an amateur naturalist and anthropologist. Many of the books she illustrated for the publisher Hutchinson & Co., London, were keenly observed and scrupulously accurate depictions of plants, birds and animals. When commissioned to do illustrations for a children's book on dinosaurs, her research into the skin colors she subsequently chose for her dinosaur illustrations was cited by the Royal Academy of Sciences. Haywood was also a practitioner of the art of fore-edge painting. She became acquainted with the art form through an uncle who was associated with the Bayntun-Riviere Bindery of Bath. She did several fore-edge and double fore-edge paintings on commission every year from the 1930s to the 1970s for Inman's Books, an antiquarian book dealer in New York City. She died in Bournemouth, England in 1995.

"Little Dorrit originally appeared in twenty numbers, bound in nineteen monthly parts, the last part forming a double number, from December 1855 - June 1857. It was published in book form on May 30, 1857" (Smith).

Provenance: Louise Dalton Kirk 1936; Purchased by David Brass Rare Books from a private California collection 2007; sold to Randal Moscovitz 2008.

Smith I, 12. Eckel pp. 82-85.

Price: $7,500.00