The Manuscript of Great Expectations: From the Townshend Collection, Wisbech

The novels of Charles Dickens (1812-70), with their inimitable energy and their comic, tragic and grotesque characters, are still widely read, and reworked for film and television. Dickens himself had the original manuscripts of his works bound and presented them to his friends: that of Great Expectations was given to Chauncy Hare Townshend, with whom Dickens shared an interest in mesmerism and the occult. Townshend bequeathed his library (and collection of paintings and ceramics) to the Wisbech and Fenland Museum in 1868. The manuscript has now been scanned and is published in the Cambridge Library Collection together with reissues of the serialized version of 1860-1 and the first book edition of 1861 (in three volumes). Dickens scholars and enthusiasts will be able to examine the work-in-progress, with all its deletions and revisions, alongside the first two published versions.