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5 volumes. Half-titles present in Volumes 2 & 5, as issued; terminal ads in Volumes 1-4. (8vo) 20x11.5 cm (8x5") original gray boards and printed spine paper labels; housed in in a brown cloth clamshell box. First Edition. 

Disraeli’s first novel, published when he was twenty-one, a bestselling roman à clef about London fashionable and political life which takes aim at several of his contemporaries, including the publisher John Murray, with whom Disraeli had had a falling out. Vivian Grey is often written about as a cornerstone work of the “fashionable” or “silver fork” school of fiction, but it is also the first work in the genre of the political novel as later practiced by Trollope, Meredith, Eliot, Wells and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Complete sets with the five volumes in first edition are uncommon. Each volume with the decorative bookplates of Saul Shapiro and E. Hubert Litchfield.