A Christmas Carol: The Original Manuscript Edition (2016)
Dickens’s handwritten manuscript, crossings-out and all.
Every edition is set from somewhere. This is the manuscript itself, with Dickens’s changes of mind visible on the page.
You want to see the story as it left Dickens’s desk, with every change he made still visible.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the manuscript held by the Morgan Library & Museum, reproduced page by page, with Dickens’s corrections, deletions and insertions.
Changes: how you read it: alongside the facsimile is a typeset version of the story, an introduction by the Morgan’s literary curator and a foreword by Colm Tóibín.
Whose story is it?
the author’s, as much as Scrooge’s. You are watching Dickens decide what to keep.
How much time does it ask?
160 pages in a W. W. Norton hardback, 2016.
W. W. Norton, 1 November 2016: “A first-ever trade edition of the original manuscript.” Foreword by Colm Tóibín.
Where to find it
Buy the hardcover — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Hardcover — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
Common questions
Can you read Dickens's original manuscript of A Christmas Carol?
Yes. W. W. Norton's Original Manuscript Edition (2016) reproduces the manuscript held by the Morgan Library & Museum, with Dickens's corrections, and prints a typeset version alongside it.
More Christmas Carols: The Penguin Classics edition, ed. Michael Slater (2003) · The Oxford World’s Classics edition, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2008) · The Annotated Christmas Carol, ed. Michael Patrick Hearn (2004)