Morgan Library’s Christmas Gift: Display of Dickens’ Decisive Deletions

Charles Dickens’ Manuscript On Display At The Morgan Library.
(Photo By Angel Franco for The New York Times.)

The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan is offering modern readers a chance to see the creative process behind Victorian literature’s most enduring holiday tale, Charles Dickens‘ A Christmas Carol. The library, housed in an Italian renaissance style palazzo in Murray Hill, holds the original manuscript of the story, written and rewritten in Dickens’ own hand. According to Alison Leigh Cowan of The New York Times, the manuscript goes on display each year at the Morgan, but under glass, with only a single page made visible to museum goers. This year, however, the collection’s curators allowed the Times to photograph the entire document and post it on the internet.

Page One of the A Christmas Carol Manuscript.

The online display offers a unique insight into the creative process behind a Christmas classic. Charles Dickens wrote the story of the haunting of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge by the the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet To Come out of sheer necessity: he was broke and needed cash. The tale of Tiny Tim and his family‘s foundering fortunes was written in a mere six weeks, and six-thousand copies of the sixty-six page book were sold to support the six Dickens children. But Dickens own perfectionism caused his profits from the initial printing to be less than a quarter of what he had hoped for: he insisted on hand-colored illustrations by famed illustrator John Leech, which sent production costs soaring.

John Leech’s Original Watercolor of The Ghost Of Christmas Present.
(Dickens insisted the painting be redone with the spirit dressed in green.)

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.