Charles Dickens’s lost jottings to be uncovered
Following a pilot study on his short novel, The Chimes, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, researchers have decided that significant lost passages might be unlocked from the original manuscripts of his great novels, including Bleak House.
The tantalising new technology did not produce any significant finds during the first crawl, besides a few interesting word changes. One sentence, “Years … are like Christians in that respect” originally read: “Years … are like men in one respect.”
However, Rowan Watson, a senior curator at the V&A, described the technology in The Independent today as “ingenious and inspiring”. The manuscripts show Dickens “almost thinking aloud on to paper,” he said....