Tavistock House
Long demolished home of Dickens
Tavistock House was the London home of the noted British author Charles Dickens and his family from 1851 to 1860. At Tavistock House, Dickens wrote Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. He also put on amateur theatricals there which are described in John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. Later, it was the home of William and Georgina Weldon, whose lodger was the French composer Charles Gounod, who composed part of his opera Polyeucte at the house.
Tavistock House was demolished in 1901.
History
Tavistock House was built by builder and developer James Burton, who probably lived in Tavistock House while he developed the surrounding area. From Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, Burton acquired the leases for two plots of land, one northern and one southern, on the east side of Tavistock Square. It was on the northern plot, and part of the southern plot, that Burton built Tavistock House. Burton sold the lease for Tavistock House to Thomas Murdock in 1805. Murdock lived there for six years before he in turn sold the lease to Benjamin Oakley in 1811.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7689129. Authority coordinates are 51.526, -0.129. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1851, 1860, 1901 and 1805.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tavistock House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.