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New technique unlocks secrets behind Charles Dickens’ books | A new digital technology has enabled people to
see the previously unseen passages from Charles Dickens’s manuscripts for the first time. The technique, which removes his crossings-out and corrections, allows researchers to discover how the author shaped and reshaped his prose. The Victoria and Albert Museum pilot study focused on his Christmas story, ‘The Chimes’, using
technology that was developed by Ian Christie-Miller, a former visiting research
fellow at London University. Although no dramatic revelations surfaced from deletions
in that short story, scholars are excited by the technology’s potential on novels
such as ‘Bleak House’. “We’re talking of tens of thousands of manuscript pages
that could potentially be unlocked,” the Independent quoted Florian Schweizer,
director of the Charles Dickens Museum in London , as saying. The technique, separating
layers of text, involves combining two or more digital images – a frontlit and
backlit image of a page. By digitally subtracting one from the other, differences
are easily revealed. In ‘The Chimes’, the tests showed for example that the published
sentence – “Years … are like Christians in that respect” – originally read: “Years
… are like men in one respect.” “Why did he make that change? Quite a change.
Literary scholars will ask themselves those questions,” Dr Schweizer said. Rowan
Watson, a senior curator at the V and A, described Dr Christie-Miller’s technology
as “ingenious and inspiring”. The manuscripts show Dickens “almost thinking aloud
on to paper,” he added.
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