Bid to £45,000 at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on July 11 was an extensively revised and corrected autograph draft of what was to become Charles Dickens’ tale of ‘Mrs Gamp with the Strolling Players’.
A jeu d’esprit in the voice of Martin Chuzzlewit’s drunken nurse, it had been written to raise £100 for a benefit fund in aid of a fellow writer, Leigh Hunt.
The tale of ‘Mrs Gamp…’ is in effect a series of humorous caricatures of Dickens’ friends, among them George Cruikshank, John Leech, Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold and August Egg.