Tuesday morning

Thinking about things:

Today is Charles Dickens' birthday. Worth remembering. Especially his masterpiece Nickolas Nickleby.

From the New York Times:

What sustained Dickens' success were these larger-than-life characters he was able to create. There were 989 named characters in Dickens' fiction. … He was powerful in depicting childhood experiences, and he wrote childhood characters that adult readers could identify with.

And too, I think it would be good to take a look at the following excerpt borrowed from the Morgan Library. Most especially the last paragraph about the intensity and intentionality of Dickens' writing--his placing words upon the page whilst imagining new words to replace the suddenly old ones with "second thoughts and changes of mind":

From the Morgan Library exhibition:

Charles Dickens at 200

Dickens at work



Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period of intense creativity in fall 1843, completing the work in a mere six weeks. He appears to have made no working notes, outline, plans, or preliminary drafts, leaving only the sixty-eight-page manuscript now in the Morgan's collection. At the foot of the manuscript title page, he added this note: "My own, and only, MS of the Book / Charles Dickens."

Dickens wrote the manuscript of A Christmas Carol in black ink, using his customary goose quill pen, on a mixture of high-quality, unlined paper: "London Superfine" for the title page and preface, and "Bath Superfine" for the narrative. Each sheet measured 8 7/8 x 7 1/4 inches. As soon as he completed the story on 2 December, he folded the manuscript vertically and either took or sent it to the printer, Bradbury and Evans. The compositors had to set type extremely quickly in order for the book to be completed by 19 December, just in time for the Christmas market. The printer sent proofs for Dickens to review by 4 or 5 December, but none of the author's revised proof pages survive.



The hundreds of revisions within the manuscript vividly convey the sense of an author writing at a fast pace, usually enacting his second thoughts and changes of mind in the heat of original composition, striking out words and phrases and replacing them with a seemingly unhesitating, continuous flow of new words on the same line. He deleted text with a cursive and continuous looping movement of the pen—rendering his first thoughts exasperatingly difficult to decipher. At the end of each "stave," he inserted a spiral swirl (known as a flourish)—a cue to the printer that the chapter had ended.

Find the entire manuscript here.