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INTRODUCTION. |
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shown in not adjusting the expenses of production with a more equable regard to the selling price," Mr. Forster euphemistically says—and the profit on the sale of the first edition was alarmingly less than had hopefully been calculated on. " Such a night as I have passed!" Charles Dickens wrote to Mr. Forster on the 10th of February, 1844, "I really believed I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever. I found the Carol accounts awaiting me, and they were the cause of it. The first six thousand copies show a profit of £230. And the last four will yield as much more. I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand clear. What a wonderful thing it is that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment !"
Eventually the sale of fifteen thousand copies, which was reached before the end of the year, produced a profit of £726, but the result of the first disappointment, closely following as it did a soreness which had arisen in regard to a clause in the Chuzzlewit agreement, was that the connection between Charles Dickens and Messrs. Chapman and Hall was severed—except that, for some reason of which I have failed to find any explanation, the Chimes was published by them at the following Christmas.
Very many editions of the Carol have been published since the eight which were issued in the original form in 1844, and it may be noted for the benefit of would-be amateurs of first editions that whereas the original title-page is generally coloured red and blue, some few copies have it in red and green—I have seen fine examples of each in the collection of Mr. Bruton of Gloucester. In 1873 Messrs. Chapman and Hall issued a post octavo reprint from the old stereo plates at five shillings, each page surrounded with a red rule to fill the larger paper, and this was preceded by a " Collected Edition" of all the Christmas books in 1869, in a demy octavo volume of four hundred and fifty-five pages with some of the original illustrations. Still earlier, in the first cheap edition, the Christmas stories were published together in a volume of two hundred and sixty-six pages, in cloth three shillings, with a new preface dated September, 1852. In the " Household Edition" they appeared as seventeenth in the series, with twenty-six illustrations by E. G. Dalziel, in a |
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