Stamp Set

2nd Class - Mr Bumble from Oliver Twist

1st Cass - Mr Pickwick from The Pickwick Papers

77p - The Little Marchioness from The Old Curiosity Shop

87p - Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit

£1.28 - Captain Cuttle from Dombey and Son

£1.90 - Mr Micawber from David Copperfield

Miniature Sheet

1st Class – Mr Pickwick – The Pickwick Papers

Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, and the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club. To extend his researches into the quaint and curious phenomena of life, he suggests that he and three other “Pickwickians” (Mr Nathaniel Winkle, Mr Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr Tracy Tupman) should make journeys to remote places from London and report on their findings to the other members of the club. Their travels throughout the English countryside by coach provide the chief theme of the novel.

77p – The Marchioness – The Old Curiosity Shop

The Marchioness is the nickname given to the wicked Miss Brass’s maidservant by Dick Swiveller, who befriends and later marries her. In the original manuscript it is made explicit that the Marchioness is in fact the illegitimate daughter of Miss Brass, possibly by the novel’s villain Quilp, but only a suggestion of this survived in the published edition.

87p – Mrs Gamp – Martin Chuzzlewitt

Sarah or Sairey Gamp was a nurse. She was dissolute and drunk and became a notorious stereotype of the bad secular nurse in the early Victorian era, before the reforms of campaigners like Florence Nightingale. The caricature was popular with the British public and umbrellas became known as gamps after her own which was displayed with “particular ostentation”. The character was based upon a real nurse described to Dickens by his friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts.

£1.28 – Captain Cuttle – Dombey and Son

Captain Edward Cuttle is left in charge of The Midshipman, Solomon Gill’s maritime instrument maker’s shop, when Soloman goes off in search of his nephew Walter Gay. Dombey’s daughter, Florence later lodges with Cuttle at The Midshipman when she runs away from her father.

£1.90 – Mr Micawber – David Copperfield

Wilkins Micawber was modelled on Dickens’s father, John Dickens, who like Micawber was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison after failing to meet his creditors’ demands. Micawber’s long-suffering wife, Emma, stands by him despite his financial exigencies that force her to pawn all of her family’s heirlooms. Micawber is hired as a clerk by the scheming Uriah Heep, who assumes wrongly that Micawber’s debts arise from his dishonesty. But working for Heep allows Micawber to expose his boss as a forger and a cheat. To start anew, Micawber and his family emigrate to Australia with Daniel Peggotty and Little Em’ly, where Micawber becomes manager of the Port Middlebay Bank and a successful government magistrate.

1st Class: Nicholas Nickleby -

Nicholas takes his cane to the bullying headmaster of Dotherboys Hall Whackford Squeers, illustration by Hablot Knight Browne from Nicholas Nickleby.

1st Class: Bleak House -

Mrs Bagnet is charmed with Mr Bucket.

1st Class: Little Dorrit -

Amy Dorrit introduces Maggy, the grand-daughter of her old nurse, to Arthur Clennam outside Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison

1st Class: A Tale of Two Cities -

Charles Darnay is arrested by the French Revolutionaries