Book Mania!

This is the one and only original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The Morgan Library and Museum displays Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in Pierpont Morgan’s historic Library until January 13, 2013. Dickens wrote his iconic tale in a six-week flurry of activity, beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. He had the manuscript bound in red morocco as a gift for his solicitor, Thomas Mitton. The manuscript then passed through several owners before Pierpont Morgan acquired it in the 1890s. 

It reveals Dickens’s method of composition, allowing us to glimpse the author at work. he began writing the story in October 1843, completing it in only six weeks. His apparently contiguous pace of writing and revision was urgent but moldly confident. The interlinear revisions increase the story’s vividness: text is struck out with a continuous looping movement of the pen and replaced with more active verbs and fewer words to achieve greater concision. Dickens sent this manuscript to the printer in early December, and the book was published in time for the Christmas market. [The Morgan, 2012] (photo: yyz2nyc)

from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

“David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens. This is the novel Dickens regarded as his ‘favourite child’ and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experience from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the ‘umble Uriah Heep, along with Mr Micawber, a portrait of Dickens’s own father which evokes the mixture of love, nostalgia and guilt.