Care to see Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol written in Dickens' own hand? The Morgan Library is displaying it for the holidays and Book Patrol has the 4-1-1.
From the post...
The Morgan manuscript reveals Dickens dickering with the story even up to the eve of publication. The initial draft left the fate of Tiny Tim to the reader's imagination. In a final change, not even indicated in the manuscript, Dickens added this passage to reassure the reader that all was well in the Cratchit family: "and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, [Scrooge] was a second father." Numerous other rewrites are visible in the online manuscript, which is chock full of deletions, corrections, additions, subtractions, redactions, retractions, expansions and contractions. All of which is rather reassuring to the aspiring writers among us: even Dickens didn't get it right the first time.
Illustration: John Leech's original watercolor of the Ghost of Christmas Present.
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