Tavistock House

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.]