Pride and Prejudice: First Editions & Notable Reprints

The 1813 first edition

Thomas Egerton published Pride and Prejudice on 28 January 1813, in the standard “triple-decker” format of three volumes, priced at 18 shillings — roughly a week’s wages for a skilled tradesman at the time. Austen sold the copyright outright for £110 rather than publishing on commission, a decision she may have later regretted given the novel’s strong sales.

Why first editions are so rare and valuable

Circulating libraries lent the small print run hard, meaning most surviving copies show heavy wear; complete, clean three-volume sets are rare enough that auction houses treat their appearance as a headline event. Because the original title page famously credits only “the Author of Sense and Sensibility” rather than Austen by name, provenance and binding condition matter enormously to collectors.

Editions worth actually reading

Edition	Best for
Penguin Clothbound Classics	Gift-giving, shelf display
Norton Critical Edition	Students, scholarly context and criticism
Oxford World’s Classics	Annotations without the Norton’s academic weight
Project Gutenberg (free)	Reading the full text online at no cost

What changed across 19th-century reprints

The 1813 first edition was followed within Austen’s own lifetime by a second edition later in 1813, correcting minor printing errors but leaving the text substantially unchanged, and a third edition in 1817 — the last printed while any editorial oversight resembling Austen’s own could plausibly have occurred, though there’s no strong evidence she was closely involved in revising later printings herself. The most consequential 19th-century publishing event for the novel wasn’t a new edition of Pride and Prejudice specifically but her nephew’s 1869 Memoir of Jane Austen, which introduced her to a much wider Victorian readership and helped establish the steady demand for reprints that has kept the novel continuously in print ever since — a run now stretching over two centuries without interruption, a genuinely rare achievement for any novel of its era.

Illustrated editions

Beyond plain reading texts, several illustrated editions have shaped how generations of readers picture the novel’s scenes. Hugh Thomson’s pen-and-ink illustrations, originally produced for an 1894 edition, remain the most widely reproduced — his depictions of scenes like Mr. Collins’s proposal and the Bennet family at breakfast established a visual vocabulary for the novel that later book covers and even some screen adaptations have drawn on directly. C.E. Brock’s illustrations for a slightly later edition offer a similar public-domain resource with a distinct visual style, useful for readers who want period-appropriate imagery without modern copyright restrictions.

Buying a first edition today

For collectors rather than readers, complete three-volume first-edition sets appear at major auction houses only occasionally, and condition matters enormously to final price — foxing, rebinding, and missing half-titles can each significantly reduce value compared to a genuinely untouched set. Individual volumes (since triple-decker sets were sometimes split up by 19th-century owners or booksellers) occasionally surface at lower price points, though a single volume of a three-volume work has far less collector value than a complete set. Anyone considering a serious purchase at this level should work with a specialist rare-book dealer or established auction house rather than a general marketplace, given how much condition and provenance affect real value.