7 William Makepeace Thackeray first editions are documented on this shelf, from Vanity Fair (1849) to The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World (1862) across 4 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that William Makepeace Thackeray title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.
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- Vanity Fair — 1847-1848 · Bradbury & EvansIssued first in 20 monthly parts (in 19, the last a double number) in canary-yellow printed wrappers, 1847-1848, with Thackeray's own illustrations; the same engraved illustration appears on the wrapper of each part, and the wrappers of the final parts occur in dated and undated states. The 1848 first edition in book form carries the three classic first-issue points: the chapter heading on page 1 in rustic type;…. The monthly parts in wrappers are the true first appearance; the 1848 bound volume is the first book edition. The three textual/illustration points (rustic-type heading page 1, the present-then-suppressed Steyne woodcut page 336, and 'Mr. Pitt' page 453) belong to the bound first edition, not the parts. Single bound volumes lacking the first-issue points, and later reprints, are not the first issue; the change of 'Mr. Pitt' to 'Sir Pitt' was made in the 1853 edition.
- The History of Pendennis — 1849 · Bradbury and EvansFirst edition, issued in 23 monthly parts (numbers 23 and 24 combined as a double part) from November 1848 to December 1850 -- publication was interrupted for roughly three months in late 1849 by Thackeray's near-fatal illness, a gap that is itself a bibliographic marker of the parts issue. First book-form edition in two volumes: volume I dated 1849 (viii,384pp.) and volume II dated 1850 (xii,372pp.), with an….
- The History of Henry Esmond — 1852 · Smith, Elder & Co.Three volumes, printed in antique/old-face type to evoke the early eighteenth century, with sixteen pages of publisher's advertisements at the rear of Volume III; issued in publisher's cloth. The antique-type setting is original to this first edition (cited in Thackeray bibliography as Van Duzer 85). The Smith, Elder three-volume edition of 1852 is the true first, with the distinctive antique-type setting and the sixteen-page advertisement section in Volume III. Later one-volume reprints are not the first edition.
- The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family — 1855 · Bradbury and EvansFirst edition, issued in 24 monthly parts in 23 (numbers 23 and 24 combined as a double number) from October 1853 to August 1855, in yellow printed wrappers with advertisements, then bound in two volumes. Illustrated throughout by Richard Doyle with an engraved vignette title, 46 full-page plates, and more than 100 wood-engraved vignettes and historiated initials -- Doyle's illustrations (rather than Thackeray's….
- The Rose and the Ring — 1855 · Smith, Elder & Co.Issued as Thackeray's Christmas book for the 1854 season under his established pseudonym 'Mr. M. A. Titmarsh,' though the title page carries the date 1855. The first edition collates to a frontispiece plus iv, 128pp, plus a 16-page publisher's catalogue at the rear, illustrated throughout with the author's own drawings, including a series of full-page plates plus chapter head- and tail-pieces and in-text….
- The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century — 1858 · Bradbury and EvansFirst edition, issued in 24 monthly parts from November 1857 to October 1859 in publisher's yellow paper wrappers with advertisements, then bound in two volumes with title pages dated 1858 and 1859. First issue, first state, is identified by the misprint 'actresses' for 'ancestresses' on page 207 (in part 7 of the serial issue), and by part 12 having chapters XLVII-XLVIII misnumbered as XLVIII-XLIX. Illustrated….
- The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World — 1862 · Smith, Elder & Co.First edition, three volumes, octavo, collating [5],329pp.; [4],304pp.; [4],301pp., following serialization in the Cornhill Magazine from January 1861 to August 1862, for which Thackeray drew the first illustrations himself before turning the series over to Frederick Walker to complete. The true first issue is bound in the publisher's green pebbled cloth with the title in gilt on the spine and yellow endpapers. A…. Bernhard Tauchnitz's Leipzig edition of the same year, in two volumes, was a Continental 'copyright edition' for sale outside Britain and is not a competing first edition; the Smith, Elder & Co. three-volume London printing is the accepted first edition. Sets bound in brown cloth with more conventional blind-and-gilt blocking (Sadleir's second issue) are a later 1862 state of the same first-edition text, not the scarcer true-first green pebbled-cloth issue.
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