Scenes of Clerical Life

No book-club edition is possible for an 1858 Blackwood novel; the traps here are "first thus" reprints and rebinds. Blackwood reissued the work repeatedly, and the 1878 Cabinet Edition is among the settings most often mistaken for the first — any copy dated later than 1858, any single-volume Blackwood copy, or any copy with a new-edition statement on the title page is not the first. Harper (New York) and Tauchnitz (Leipzig) issues are reprints. Because Sadleir noted the book "in any state is now rare" and ranked it the scarcest of Eliot's novels in the original cloth, copies in fresh original cloth are far outnumbered by period rebinds in morocco and half-calf; a handsome 19th-century binding is not evidence of a first, and the collation plus the 1858 Blackwood title page must be checked independently of the covers.