Dickens wrote and published all his novels in serial form, meaning they were published in instalments month by month as he was writing them. “This was central to how the novel developed as a cultural form during the 19th century,” says Dr Adam Grener, senior lecturer in the English Literatures and Creative Communication programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and co-director of the Digital Dickens Notes project, along with Dr Anna Gibson, assistant professor at North Carolina State University.
“While most other major writers of the 19th century published some or all of their novels serially, Dickens was really the only novelist whose craft and artistic sensibilities were shaped so thoroughly by serial form.”
The Digital Dickens Notes project focuses on Dickens’ working notes, and how his novels came into being month by month. “To really understand what it means to encounter a novel like those written by Dickens means to take seriously and to think carefully about how they’re bound in space and time in the process of creation,” Adam says. “Our project emerged out of our encounter with these working notes that he started keeping about midway through his career as he navigated serial form.”
Dickens’ notes can be viewed in the archive at the National Art Library (Victoria and Albert Museum) in London, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and have been reproduced in various ways, such as transcriptions on the backs of Penguin editions of his novels. The Digital Dickens Notes project reproduces them in comprehensive and high resolution format, in “an attempt to leverage digital platforms to make a material encounter with the notes accessible”.
Basic text transcriptions tend to make them look like static objects or planning documents, “but when you actually encounter the working notes in the archive,” Adam says, “you can see they're covered in different layers of ink which make it clear that he was visiting the notes many times during the production of a given instalment.” Digital Dickens Notes aims to produce transcriptions of the working notes that capture their complexity—not only the different layers of ink, but also the idiosyncratic check marks, underlines, boxes, and circles that Dickens used as a way of writing to himself.
Alongside transcriptions of these complex materials, Adam, Anna, and student researchers are also providing analysis. “We've analysed the working notes in relationship to the manuscript to understand and try to provide as accurate a picture as possible of how they reflect and are in dialogue with the compositional process.”
The Digital Dickens Notes platform also has scholarly annotations that add further information about the meaning of the working notes, as well as guides for using the notes for teaching or research purposes.
Adam and Anna have been working on the project since 2017 and built the website during 2021‒2022 with the support of digital specialists.
“Part of the challenge and the beauty of an online resource like this is that we've had to think carefully about how to make it usable for different kinds of audiences,” says Adam.
“We want it to be useful for scholars who want to think about Dickens’ compositional process and practice. But we can't presuppose that anybody that visits the website has extensive knowledge about Dickens or even about the Victorian novel. So the website has a short overview of what serialisation was, who Dickens was, how he went about writing his novels, and what the working notes are.
“We also have a scholarly introduction on the website that makes an argument for the importance of the working notes for thinking about Dickens's own craft and then also the Victorian novel more broadly.
“It's both deeply committed to the scholarly work, but also public facing in its efforts to introduce different readers to this kind of archival material. The work itself is really fed by the strong community we have in the English programme, with colleagues doing exciting, innovative, ground-breaking work. Our classrooms are also alive with students really engaged in thinking with literature and about historical literatures.”
The NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant will help the team finish the project over 2026 and 2027: transcribing and annotating complete sets of working notes for the three different novels not yet featured on the website, as well as incomplete documents for other novels, and integrating images in collaboration with the archives that hold the manuscripts.