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On Thursday 10 December, the ‘Deciphering Dickens’ project hosted a small group of Dickens, manuscript, and handwriting enthusiasts to take part in an online ‘transcribe-a-thon’ of
Little Dorrit.
As well as sharing Dickens’s manuscripts with a wider audience, we want to learn more about Dickens’s creative process by deciphering the insertions, deletions, and other corrections that the author made to his manuscripts as he wrote. Many of these alterations are heavily crossed out, and require a combination of patience and persistence (and the occasional moment of divine inspiration!) to decipher.
Charles Dickens,
Little Dorrit manuscript, chapter 1, 1855
As there are so many manuscripts, and the deletions are so difficult to decipher in places, we’re looking for ways to crowdsource this process. We hope that the more people we can share the manuscripts with, the more we will be able to decipher. As part of the next phase of our project, we have been planning events in which we can invite others to take part.