Royal Doulton Figurine Sairy Gamp HN2100

Sairey Gamp (HN2100) was designed by Leslie Harradine and issued from 1952 to 1967, standing 7.25 inches tall. She belongs to Royal Doulton's Dickens Series Three — the group that includes Pecksniff HN2098, Mr. Micawber HN2097, Mr. Pickwick HN2099 and Fat Boy HN2096, and which represents the most ambitious and fully realised chapter of Doulton's long engagement with the characters of Charles Dickens.

Sairey Gamp is drawn from Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), where she appears as a monthly nurse and midwife of advanced age, unreliable competence, and an intimate relationship with a bottle of gin. Dickens rendered her as a figure of comic horror — the nurse you would least wish to attend you — and the character lodged so deeply in the Victorian public imagination that her ever-present umbrella gave the English language a word: a gamp, still used colloquially for an umbrella to this day. Harradine captured her exactly as Dickens drew her: an old woman of formidable presence and dubious virtue, umbrella in hand, dressed in the dark coat and black hat of her trade.

The fifteen-year production window and the Dickens series context make Sairey Gamp particularly appealing to the cross-collecting audience that pursues Doulton's literary range. She draws buyers from the Dickens collecting world as well as from the broader Harradine and character figure communities, and she pairs naturally with the other Series Three companions in a display context.