Dickens desk sold for huge sum by Christies

Reuters

THE desk where Charles Dickens wrote "Great Expectations" and his final correspondence hours before his death fetched £433,250 at auction Friday, around seven times its pre-sale estimate.

The Irish entrepreneur who bought the furniture called the price “a bargain” for such a piece of literary history. “It's a part of Charles Dickens, so I'm delighted to be its owner,” Tom Higgins told Reuters after the sale. “I've been a huge Dickens fan for a long time. I actually think it's worth a lot more than what I paid for it and expected it could have gone for as much as £5 million. “I think it's a bargain, really,” added Higgins, 49, who plans to be Ireland's first space tourist.

He added that the fact that proceeds from the sale were going to Great Ormond Street children's hospital in London made it easier to part with the cash. Christie's sold the furniture as part of its valuable books and manuscripts sale in London, and the price includes the buyer's premium.

The writing desk and chair from the study of Dickens' Gad's Hill residence near Rochester, Kent, was passed on by descent to Christopher Charles Dickens and his wife Jeanne-Marie Dickens. She then donated them to Great Ormond Street, with which Dickens had a close association. According to Christie's, Dickens wrote “Great Expectations” and a number of other late novels and short stories at the mahogany writing desk.

The auctioneer quoted the memoirs of Dickens' eldest daughter Mamie Dickens saying that on the evening of June 8, 1870, Dickens wrote letters “and arranged some trifling business matters” in the library where the desk stood. He went for dinner and collapsed after suffering a stroke, and died the following day aged 58.

In the same sale, Christie's sold the typescript copy of the first half of Winston Churchill's famous speech to parliament in 1940 about the war situation during the Battle of Britain for £139,250, in line with expectations. The manuscript includes amendments in Churchill's own hand. A first folio of William Shakespeare's plays, one of about 200 copies known to exist to this day, fetched £445,250, compared with a £300,000 to STG400,000 pre-sale estimate.