Manuscript List or Ledger of Insurance Agents for the Phoenix Company 1804 to 1859

A small book, 14.5 by 22cm, containing roughly 346 pages of thin watermarked paper, in two sets of tabbed alphabetical sections, with some unused pages at the end of sections, but for the most part filled in black and red ink in a variety of elegant hands. Bound in full green calf lettered in gilt, with a functioning brass clasp to the fore-edge, the text block roughly trimmed top and bottom, with marbled endpapers front and rear. The leather is quite rubbed and marked, with some chips and small tears, the corners are bumped. The text block is toned, rubbed, grubby and marked, showing hard office use over many decades. The book was conserved in 1971, there are repairs to some pages along their inner edges, mostly towards the front, though half a century later the paper is beginning to split along the lines of the much stiffer repairs, it has probably been fully re-cased and there is cloth reinforcement sewn in at the gutters, with notes from the Victorian period mounted to the front pastedown, a bound in note from the archivist at the 1971 restoration and a tipped-in manuscript list of foreign agents of the Phoenix on a small sheet of paper, listing the names and locations of 29 Agents as far afield as Shanghai, Java and Trinidad, looking to date from the mid-nineteenth century. There is an ink stamp to the first blank indicating that it was part of the Sun Alliance Insurance Group's Phoenix Archive, and more recently from the archives of the RSA Insurance Group with their barcode strip to the front endpaper. The first tabbed section of 266 pages lists the Phoenix Agents by location, giving their Title, Place, Date of Appointment and Trade, the majority men but also some women, e.g. Miss Jane Cooke, a Grocer of Stamford, who was appointed in 1840. This section shows the gradual expansion of the Phoenix Fire Office from London outward, as they sought fresh risks to insure, seemingly the earliest recorded being Thomas Bowman, a Printer in Richmond, who was appointed in 1804, and the latest appointments noted being made in 1859. New appointments of Agents are sparse throughout the Napoleonic Wars, but gradually increase in number post-Waterloo from 1815. Many are neatly crossed through though still perfectly legible, and new appointments in the same location are listed beneath, the defunct Agent presumably having resigned, been sacked or died, there are also annotations to earlier entries regarding changes. The second section of approximately 80 pages lists the Agents alphabetically by name, with additional information given under the headings of: Place, By Whom Recommended, and the amount of the Security provided. Clive Trebilcock utilises the book as a key primary resource in 'Phoenix Assurance [] Volume I 1782-1870' (1985), analysing the spread of the Phoenix's activities, and the occupations and class backgrounds of the Agents selected to sell fire insurance policies. A remarkable and historically important survival from one of Britain's largest and most innovative insurance companies, particularly in the extent to which they aggressively built and developed a network of individual local agents who operated independently from the central office, providing insight into the social and commercial make-up of Britain and Ireland during the height of the industrial revolution, not to mention much useful genealogical information from the pre-census era.…