Condition: Good: Good condition for a used book! Some wear. Inscription on f.e.p. is dated 1926. Early Edition of this Shepard illustrated copy with colour plates and 28 black and white. In red cloth covers with black decoration. Illustrated throughout by Ernest D. Shepard. Back endpaper has a few small holes in it and some foxing. Front board has a black smudge at edge and slight wrinkle in red cloth. See images for the condition of this book.
Blurb: The Holly-Tree is a collection of short stories by Charles Dickens was originally published in the 1855 Christmas edition of Dickens’s Household Words.
The main character in this collection is a young man named Charles, who presents himself as a bashful man and one that was thwarted in love and therefore means to emigrate to the United States via Liverpool. On his way there, however, he is surprised by heavy snowfalls and has to stop at the eponymous Holly-Tree Inn, where, at first rather reluctant to press himself on the innkeeper and his family and servants, he whiles away some time in solitude before he starts taking an interest in the lives of the other people at the inn and listening to their stories. In the hour of his departure, when the roads have been freed from the snow – which may well serve as a symbol of his tendency to bury himself in his own shell –, his love troubles are resolved in a rather implausible ending in which, all rather unpremeditatedly falls into place.