The novels of Charles Dickens (1812-70), with their inimitable energy and their comic, tragic and grotesque characters, are still widely read, and reworked for film and television. Great Expectations was (like most of Dickens' works) first published in serial form, in his periodical All the Year Round, shortly before the first book edition of 1861. The serial version is now reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection simultaneously with the three-volume book edition and a volume of newly photographed actual-size colour images of the entire original manuscript. Dickens himself had the manuscript bound and presented to his friend Chauncy Hare Townshend, with whom he shared an interest in mesmerism and the occult, and in 1868 Townshend bequeathed his library (including the manuscript) to the Wisbech and Fenland Museum. Dickens scholars and enthusiasts will now be able easily to study the two-column serialisation alongside the work-in-progress and the first book edition.
