1/5/26
When I finished transcribing Charles Dickens' handwritten manuscript of "A Christmas Carol," where it is made available online by the Morgan Library and Museum, and had drafted the first three chapters of my book, I had the whim to search with my Microsoft AI co-pilot. I don't remember the keywords, but something to do with the "Carol." In the results, was something called the "Deciphering Dickens Project." I had never heard of it, but I was chagrined to learn that, as it seemed, someone else had beaten me to it! There, certain scholars had been busy transcribing several of Dickens' handwritten manuscripts, including "A Christmas Carol," since (as I recall) 2018 or 2019. And they had posted their transcription online!

This was a disaster. My big draw was to be that mine was the only transcription of the "Carol" in the world...and here, it had already been done by the experts.

But I looked into the matter a little further. First of all, I glanced at their results. In the published book, the second paragraph begins:

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail.

This, incidentally, is quintessential Mathew Whittier. But it so happens that the first one-word sentence had been redacted and replaced with the word "Mind!" Underneath, was a word which the scholars had interpreted as "dead!"

It isn't "dead!," which actually would not be predicted, logically, in context. I don't know the technical terms. Let's see...I'll ask AI (which is to say, "my" trained AI) to explain it for me in those terms:

The problem with transcribing the redacted opening of the second paragraph as “dead!” is not primarily a question of vocabulary, but of discourse function. By the end of the first paragraph, the narrator has already completed the task of asserting Marley’s death and explicitly closed off any doubt about it; that rhetorical work is finished. The opening sentence of the second paragraph does not react to that fact, but instead performs a structural reorientation, shifting the reader’s attention away from the question of whether Marley is dead and toward the figurative language used to describe death. In technical terms, this sentence functions as a metadiscursive intervention: the narrator momentarily steps outside the narrative content to guide the reader’s interpretation. An exclamatory word like “dead!” operates as a reaction or evaluation, implying that the issue of Marley’s death is still under debate, whereas the actual sentence introduces a caveat, warning the reader not to overinterpret the simile “dead as a door-nail” too literally. The revised word “Mind!” works precisely because it is an admonitory discourse marker and second-person directive, signaling that a qualification is about to follow. What comes next is not a reconsideration of Marley’s death, but a reflection on the limits of the narrator’s knowledge and on inherited language itself. Any transcription that opens the paragraph with a reactive exclamation rather than a reader-orienting cue fails to prepare the rhetorical move that the paragraph actually makes, and therefore misidentifies the function of the redacted word within the structure of the prose.

These experts should have recognize this--especially when their error appears "front-and-center" on the first page! So I had my first clue that all was not lilacs and roses in this effort, made in official connection with the Museum.

I fought the temptation to use their transcription, because I didn't want to be beholden to them in any way. So I never explored it beyond this second paragraph. But for the record, the redacted word is not "dead!" It's "dear!" with a letter "e" tacked on the end, perhaps as an afterthought, to yield "deare!" I know this because I have identified Dickens' unique letter "r" used always at the end of a word, and it's present, here. It looks like a small, italicized capital "N." I have also identified his box-shaped letter "e," which he uses on occasion. It looks like a small capital "C" with 90-degree angled corners; or a capital "E" without the middle bar. It looks something like this: ⊏

I looked a little further into this project, and I learned that they had only gotten 1/3 of the way into their transcription. Then, examining their Updates page, I found that the last recorded update was from some years ago; and coming back to it, I found that one of the three project leaders--being still listed--had retired and moved on to managing his own private collection. I wrote to him, so far with no response. I also got no response from one of the other project leaders, a prominent figure in academia.

There's a mention that they projected a publication date, in a journal, in 2025--but 2025 has now come and gone.

Then, I discovered that their method, when they launched this project several years ago, was to crowdsource it with volunteers from the general public. Now I could make a pretty good guess as to what had happened. It's on two distinct levels. On the surface level, it just got too hard, and the unpaid volunteers lost interest. Dickens aggressively and intentionally hid what was underneath his redactions. And he gets more aggressive--and more devious--as the manuscript goes along.

But I think there's a deeper layer. The scholars began to recognize frightening evidence that Dickens was plagiarizing another author--perhaps, two distinct authors--which was emerging from underneath these redaction marks. Time to shovel the dirt back in the hole and pretend nothing had happened, here!

I say that not in rank speculation, but because this evidence is so extremely obvious. For example, they think this is the first draft. But after pages of the Spirit of Christmas Future being portrayed as a silent figure, when Scrooge asks if he is the man who lay upon the bed, he suddenly replies, out loud, "You are." This verbal response is redacted, but it's quite clear. It means, logically, that this can't possibly be the second draft. Why? Because the entire original chapter had to have had this Spirit talking, but there is no sign of it. Therefore, all of that had to have been in an earlier draft.

These experts aren't stupid, even if they play dumb. They can read that kind of evidence as well as I can. But the evidence for plagiarism is just as blatant. And they would have seen it, even in the first third of the manuscript. (Had they continued, it's even more obvious, and more devastating.)

All that I've shared, before. But recently, I was poking around in their website, and I found that they have photographic representations of several of Dickens' other manuscripts, as well. And the pattern of redactions is revealing. I found plentiful evidence that the heavier and thicker the redaction marks in "A Christmas Carol," the more likely it was that he was revising Abby Whittier's prose. The reason is that her literary voice is almost diametrically opposite of his. So he had to take feminine, poetic, spiritual, elevated language and reduce it to his own crass, worldly register. That sets up the working principle: "The heavier the redactions, the more likely it is that Dickens is plagiarizing." And further, "The heaviest redactions will occur where the original author's literary voice was the most different from his."

Makes sense, right?

So what I found, simply by glancing over the pages without attempting to transcribe any of the text, is that most of his published novels feature heavy redaction marks. The heaviest marks appear to be in "Little Dorrit." However, there are two exceptions--"Oliver Twist," and "American Notes." I would suggest that the difference is that "Oliver Twist" was written based on illustrator George Cruikshank's ideas. That's what Cruikshank himself announced, publicly, shortly after Dickens' death. Dickens' publicist, John Forster, discredited him in the eyes of the public, and of all subsequent historians--but I think he was telling the truth. Therefore, in "Oliver Twist" Dickens did not have to hide anyone else's text, per se (even though it wasn't really his).

Most of "American Notes" was Dickens' own writing. So the reason there are relatively light redactions in these two works, is that Dickens actually wrote them.

This means that the rumor which Jane Seymour, widow of Dickens' first illustrator, Robert Seymour, reported in 1854 was correct, i.e., that Dickens had plagiarized quite a few of his most popular novels.

It's no wonder they won't write me back. At this point, it an't be because I'm an amateurish scholar. It's because I'm a very rigorous lay scholar working entirely outside the system. Had they tried to debate me 10 years ago, before I had acquired so much evidence, they might have been able to discredit me. But it's too late for that, now.

Sincerely,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.