Page 9 - PBCOctober2012

Pickwick Bicycle Club Magazine. Volume 9 No.3 October 2012
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The following article is from the Summer 2012 issue of the London Metropolitan
Archives (LMA) online newsletter and was originally published in the newsletter
for volunteer indexers working on the Place in the Sun project, which is
creating an online index to 18th and 19th century Sun Fire Office insurance
records at LMA, searchable at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/ and
www.lma.gov.uk.

It is reproduced here by kind permission of Mrs Philippa Smith Newsletter Editor and Principal
Archivist (Collections and Systems Management), London Metropolitan Archives,
40,Northampton Road, London EC1R 0HB

CHARLES DICKENS, SUN POLICYHOLDER

A Place in the Sun volunteer Brenda Griffith-Williams writes about Charles Dickens’ time
at 48 Doughty Street, now his only surviving house in London.

It seems especially appropriate, in his bicentenary year, to discover that ‘Charles Dickens, gent.’
insured the contents of his home at 48 Doughty Street (now the Dickens Museum) with the Sun
Insurance Office. Aged just 25 and married for less than a year, Dickens moved to Doughty Street
on 25 March 1837 with his wife Catherine (née Hogarth) and their baby son (another Charles).
He had taken the property on a three-year lease, at £80 a year, and lived there until December
1839. His policy (no. 1250620 in CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/564) is dated 17 May 1837. In
addition to the standard cover for wearing apparel, printed books and plate, he insured his musical
instruments for £50 and china and glass for a further £90.

Dickens was already a popular author on his arrival in Doughty Street, and his literary career had
entered a productive phase to which the Sun‛s designation ‘gent.‛
(often a euphemism for ‘unemployed’) hardly does justice. He had been working as a journalist
since 1828, and publishing short stories since 1833. Serialisation of his first novel, ‘The Pickwick
Papers’, began in April 1836, followed by the first monthly instalment of ‘Oliver Twist’ in February
1837. By the end of that year, Pickwick had come out in volume form, and a third novel, ‘Nicholas
Nickleby’, was published in 1838-9.

The Dickens family experienced both tragedy and happiness at their home in Doughty Street,
where Catherine’s 17 year old sister, Mary Hogarth, died suddenly on 7 May 1837. Dickens was
reputedly so grief-stricken that he was unable to complete the next monthly instalment of either
‘The Pickwick Papers’ or ‘Oliver Twist’. But on a happier note, Charles and Catherine‛s first two
daughters were born in the house: Mary, known as Mamie, in 1838, and Kate in 1839. The
expanding family then moved into more spacious (and expensive) accommodation at 1 Devonshire
Terrace, near Regent‛s Park.

48 Doughty Street is now Dickens’ only surviving house in London. It was saved from threatened
demolition by the Dickens Fellowship in 1923, and opened to the public two years later. Dickens’s