Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

The manuscript

The Wisbech & Fenland Museum holds one of the treasures of English literature: Charles Dickens’s original handwritten manuscript of Great Expectations, written in 1860 and 1861.

Dickens had the manuscript bound and gave it to his friend Chauncy Hare Townshend in July 1861. Townshend left it to the museum, where it has been since 1868. It has travelled to the British Museum, the V&A and the Royal Albert Hall, and in 2025 and 2026 to exhibitions in Busan and Shanghai, where more than 1.7 million people saw it.

Our part

Manuscripti has worked with the museum on imaging the manuscript. A bound literary manuscript cannot be pressed flat, so pages are captured from above with the volume supported in a cradle, under light that does the paper no harm.

Every page shows Dickens at work: lines struck through, words squeezed in above, whole passages rethought, in his own hand. Good images keep the detail that matters to a reader of a manuscript, down to the loops of his cancellations, so what was written and then crossed out can still be made out.

Why it matters

Set beside what was printed, the manuscript shows the changes made between Dickens’s pen and the published page, and between the weekly serial and the finished book. It shows the famous change to the ending too, with the original lines boxed and crossed out.

Digital images mean the manuscript can be studied in detail, by anyone, while the original stays safely in the museum’s care, or travels for exhibition without the work it supports stopping.