Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in just 6 weeks to raise much-needed cash in September 1843.
Printing the manuscript was a Christmas rush job, so there wasn't enough time for Dickens to make a clean manuscript copy. As a result, the copy that went to print is heavily marked up and extremely difficult to read. It has all of Dickens’s additions and subtractions in his own hand.
The manuscript is housed in the Morgan Library. And every year they turn the page so you can look at the next spread. This year, for the first time, all 66 pages are available online. (So you won't have to wait 64 years to see the entire book.)
The watercolor of the Ghost of Christmas Present, above left, had to be redone because the spirit was supposed to be wearing green, not red.
Here's just two of the changes he made to the text (so brilliant!):
On page 3, he inserts “his eyes sparkled” to amplify the portrait of Scrooge’s nephew, whose beneficence is crucial to the plot.
On page 12, where Scrooge takes Marley’s ghost to be evidence not of the supernatural, but of his own indigestion, (“more of gravy than of grave,”) he converts the offending bit of food from being a “spot of mustard” to a less digestible “blot of mustard.” (Genius!)
Read more here.
Listen to an interview here.
