Our second stocking filler from the CMT is the manuscript of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, which you can find in an online facsimile here. Held in the Pierpont Morgan, just round the corner from the New York Public Library, the manuscript gives a wonderful sense of creativity on the wing, with numerous crossings-out, interlinings, second- and third-thoughts darkening the page.

Towards the end of the tale, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shows Scrooge his neglected gravestone, and Scrooge asks: “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?” He answers the question himself: “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead … But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!” And a few lines later, he begs: “Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!” Dickens is, as ever, busily crafting every sentence as he goes; in that last sentence he first writes ‘change’, then alters it to the more intense ‘sponge away’. Scrooge’s desire to rewrite his own ending chimes with the creative act that unfurls before our eyes.

The notes to this edition tell us that the sentence by which Dickens clarified that Tiny Tim did not die was added as an afterthought. The manuscript leaves this crucial matter suspended in an unforeseeable future.