Tavistock House

Home of "The Smallest Theatre in the World," in which Dickens and Collins first staged The Frozen Deep in 1857.

Source: Forster, II, 89

Tavistock Street, which runs north of the Strand and south of Covent Garden, lends its name to fashionable Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, west london, where Charles Dickens lived from 1851 to 1860. Here, too, his first published story, "The Bloomsbury Christening:" (later re-titled "Mr. Minns and His Cousin") is set. His tenancy of No. 1 Devonshire Terrace having expired in the autumn of 1851, Dickens acquired the lease on the mansion from his friend and fellow Shakespeare Society member, the artist Frank Stone, A. R. A., one of the team that illustrated the last of the Christmas Books, The Haunted Man, in the autumn of 1848

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[This image may be used without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose.]

While living at Tavistock House, Dickens wrote Bleak House, Hard Times For These Times, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities, and collaborated with Wilkie Collins on the melodrama The Frozen Deep. For the initial production of this play, as well as for The Lighthouse, and the children's plays William Tell, Tom Thumb, and Fortunio and His Seven Gifted Servants, Dickens converted the house's large schoolroom into "The Smallest Theatre in the World." The first such play presented there during his first Twelfth Night entertainments the burlesque Guy Fawkes by Alfred Smith.

Preparations for the private play had gone on incessantly up to Christmas [1856], and, in turning the schoolroom into a theatre, sawing and hammering worthy of Babel continued for weeks. the priceless help of [artist Clarkson] Stanfield had again been secured, and I remember finding him one day at Tavistock House in the act of upsetting some elaborate arrangements by Dickens, with a proscenium before him made up of chairs, and the scenery planned out with walking-sticks. But Dickens's art in a matter of this kind was to know how to take advice; and no suggestion came to him that he was not ready to act upon, if it presented the remotest likelihood. [Forster, II, 134]

After three months of feverish preparation, The Frozen Deepwas first performed on 6 January 1857 to a select audience by an amateur cast composed of Dickens's friends and family, with CD himself in the role of the self-sacrifing Richard Wardour. In 1857, Dickens achieved the boyhood dream of acquiring Gad's Hill Place, Higham-by-Rochester, Kent, at about the same time that he met Ellen Lawless Ternan; the following year, he and Catherine separated, and it was then only a matter of time before he quitted the London residence where he and his family had spent so many happy times together. In August, 1860, he sold Tavistock House for two thousand guineas, and moved out the following month; all the mouldings and pictures were translated to Gad's Hill Place.

References

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. The "Charles Dickens Edition." 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, [n. d.]

Last modified 17 July 2007